I'm sorry if you are trying to leave a comment on this blog. This may be the final straw. I think I may finally move to Wordpress. it breaks my heart, since I helped with early versions of Movabletype. But it just gets stinkier and stinkier every single release.
When are they going to start usability testing ballots, already?
I don't know why, but my dad does love stupid interfaces. Perhaps it is the human in the machine, revealing itself...
In Lotus Notes email, if you have an email message open and click on the "delete" button, you get this error message: "Cannot remove NotesDocument [sic] when instantiated [sic] by NotesUIDocument [sic]." I just LOVE that one! It really reads like parody. (And doesn't explain why there IS a delete button if it won't work in that view.) I suppose it shows I have a geek sense of humor, but I find it very funny.
"When one buys a print on Flickr/Yahoo, the order form calls for "name on credit card." In my case, all the cards I use have "Griffeth A. Wodtke." I then put in all my info -- name, card number, expiration, security code -- and get a message "special characters are not allowed. Please remove them and try again." I couldn't see any special characters, so I redid the credit card number, no luck. Redid the security code, nope, not it. Redid the expiration date, not that either. At that point I concluded it was a glitch and the thing just wasn't going to work, so was about to give up, when it occured to me to delete the middle initial and period. As you of course have known from the beginning, that was it. But is this user friendly? What if the person doesn't know what a "special character" is? I sort of do, but don't really think of a period as a special character, more like # and $ and < and such. And when you ask for the name on the card, you're going to get some with middle initials. Interesting example of designers not thinking it through. Bet they've lost some sales because of that."
Okay, I'll admit it. This has become the cute baby/bad basecamp website. Now that I'm back from Europe perhaps that'll change. Perhaps.
In anycase:
Hmm what do we see here? Could it be a popup with contents too big for the window, and yet scrollbar set for "no"?
How do I interview people (for the press, not for jobs)? | Ask MetaFilter is just a terrific comment I tripped over, especially for those doing user research.
If I could do one thing to basecamp (having been using it for the first time for a couple months now) I'd add a tiny wiki. Projects need a place for permanent links & lists. basecamp doesn't seem to offer an place for that.
If you click the link, a message will go to me, the blog owner. But guess what: I can't do anything about the problem. The "questionable" post isn't held for my approval. It doesn't exist in the system, it's merely rejected so I as admin never see it unless you the poster mail it to me. And look at the text of this post: I have no idea why it's questionable, and what I as a poster should do to try to fix it.
How did I get this posted eventually? It was no small workaround, I'll tell you. I changed the text body to the word "fish", then posted that. Then I went into the tool and replaced the word "fish" with the desired comment post. I first tried replacing one potentially questionable word after another in the orginal post, but eventually gave up after five rejected attempts and used a placeholder. Please don't ask me why the word "fish". That's just how it is. We've all got our personal foobars.
It's particularly painful to me as the site moderator because I feel I'm represented as someone who disapproves of the post, yet could be talked into posting it if I was contacted. Instead I'm someone who is fine with the post yet cannot do anything simple about getting it up. If I didn't love you, my dear commenters (even when you are mean!) I think I'd just say fergetaboudit and turn off comments. I'm not sure what is worse; comment spam or MT's fighting of it.
I've restrained myself so far in expressing how painful I find MT because I adore adore adore the staff that I know over there. But I lambast yahoo, google and realplayer every time they are moronic. Criticism sometimes leads to improved behavior. I pray it will here. Because this product sucks.
I juiced with the Philippe Starck Juicer, and it made me sad.
Juice flies everywhere. The item is not stable-- it wobbled with each turn. I found myself starting the orange on the juicer, then finishing just with hand. Gorgeous, but art not appliance. In case you were wondering.
Compare to the juicer i own, a wedding present from my sister. It looks like a Brancusi, but works beautifully. No splash, fast, powerful and has outlived a couple electric juicers my husband is drawn to.
When will people realize beautiful and usable are synonyms, not antonyms.
After joining Yahoo, I have taken up many of the services, including calendar, mail, movies, etc. One thing I cannot figure out is why I'm asked to log in at any given time. I haven't' been able to figure out a pattern in two years: i just know sometimes it knows me and sometimes it doesn't.
Yahoo, snapfish, ofoto, netflix, and everyone else who asks me to log in: hear me now. Ask me about my preferences. I am happy to tell you have two computers, both single use. I'm happy to tell you you can log me on forever, as I am the only oe who uses these things. read my IP. know me. cookie me. please. I'll tell you I'm not paranoid about my yahoo mail or my snapfish photos or my netflix queue because I have no secrets there. I'll tell you i am paranoid about my wells fargo account and my etrade account and don't cookie me at all there.
I will happily tell you everything, if you would please stop second guessing me, and just let me tell you what I care about. you can second guess me in teh beginnning, and be paranoid as you wish, but i will free you of responsibility if i could just set my preferences. your lawyers would probably love it.
yahoo, please stop asking me to sign in.
from Risks of Quantitative Studies
"Number fetishism leads usability studies astray by focusing on statistical analyses that are often false, biased, misleading, or overly narrow. Better to emphasize insights and qualitative research. "
and in response, from Measuring Usability: The Risks of Discounted Qualitative Studies
"The discerning usability analyst should employ a mix of both qualitative and quantitative methods when discovering usability problems. The risks of relying heavily on a qualitative approach can lead to a severe misdiagnosis especially when usability problems are difficult to detect. "
i wish instead of previous and next when mail is sorted chronologically they would use older and newer. bah.
using squirelmail-- i could write an insulting sonnet about squirelmail.
TC 510 Course Website David Farkas has an amazing collection of web-based articles supplementing his course that would make fine reading over the holidays-- the breadth and diversity of the reading would help round out any IA or ID thinking.
I was so stunned by this monument of unusability, I had to share. Of course, any software that comes with a scanner or a digital camera is usually a pretty good candidate for an interface hall of shame, but I felt this one was kinda special. It's from ACDC's plug-in, photostitch, which allows you to stick together images into a panorama, such as below.
So, since it's the end of the year, I'll let you-all find the usability problems. How fun!
We can start with: Guess what you do to launch the stitching functionality?
Guess how many times I hit "cancel" accidentally?!
Guess what words I used to describe my experience?!?!
(Answer to first question: you hit one of those big purple things above to launch the stitching functionality. Now as a bonus guess how many times I started the stitch before I had preferences set?!? How fun!
Answer to second question: 3 times!
Answer to third question #$%@$*&$*&%
Answer to bonus question: just once but see third answer for that also)
Check it out: the fly-out menu uses transparency, which means you have this mishmash of type on type. A great choice for a book that's called In Search of Stupidity
from HCI as Science | unraveled
"As the class identified, HCI has plenty of current phenomena, but due to advances in technology those phenomena are radically changing and continue to change. This is a strong contrast to traditional sciences such as chemistry and biology where phenomena are generally static. Since HCI phenomena are constantly changing, HCI is constantly moving into new domains, redefining itself and absorbing new types of technology. Basically, there are no static phenomena so there can't be an HCI paradigm. Furthermore, since there is no HCI paradigm, HCI is not a science."
I'm not completely convinced that there is no stable phenomena, but suspect we have not observed the matter long enough to see the patterns in apparently various phenomena. from an intellegent comment on that post
"The Wright brothers constructed a working airplane without knowledge of aerodynamics, fluid mechanics, etc. They just applied tried and true engineering best practices which they learned from working on bicycles (plus a ton of trial and error)." Sometimes it takes a while to understand why things work, and see what the laws are.
Still, I have long suspected HCI is not science but craft.
I was teaching personas, and a user researcher in the class approached me after extremely concerned-- the idea of making up personas, even with rich data, unnerved her. It just didn't seem scientific, and one might make a mistake in deciding who to design for. I pointed out 8 users wasn't exactly a safe procedure either. And I told her something I've noticed. if I create a persona... even if I don't use it again beyond the initial creation... I design better. and I mean that quantifiably: I not only discover more innovative solutions, I also get fewer usability issues later in the lab. If I use the persona for scenarios and task analysis, I get still fewer errors, and of reduced severity.
I'd love ot see a formal study on this, but for now I know my craft is improved by good HCI practices.
Love love love this error...
I feel my heart filling with pity for this poor, innocent malformed request.
I'm a heavy Netflix user. In my opinion, Netflix is why you buy a DVD player, not the other way around. I visited Blockbuster recently, to get a big pile of movies in preparation for tuesday's dental surgery, and I noticed Blockbuster has rolled out a new "Movie freedom pass." It allows you to keep two movies as long as you want, and see as many as you want, two at a time, for a flat fee.
My husband read the offer as we stood at the counter checking out, and snorted "same as Netflix except you have to go to the store and you get crappier films." The endlessly maligned Blockbuster clerk did not respond, merely continued to ring me up. Sometime I think the clerks' apathy provide a challenge to my husband's gallic nature, as he seems to save his most insulting comments about american culture for our arrival at the counter.
So: back to Netflix.com. They've redesigned their site. Because I visit Netflix so often, and typically from clicking an email as often as navigating there, I had the good fortune to have old Netflix and new Netflix open in two windows and was able to capture at a page of each for comparison. And here is my rambling observations...
Below is the redesign explanation page. Most sites undergoing a major redesign now respect this best practice. A few years back, complete redesigns & rearchitectures were sprung on users regularly with hardly a word of explanation. Now there is usually a tour or guidepage explaining what sort of mischief the designers have been getting into and how to adjust to the new design. Even when a design is a great improvement, users of the previous design will often have problems as they relearn the interface.
Unfortunately the vast majority of the users will not turn to the explanation page, except perhaps out of curiosity or if they can't locate a favored feature and want to see if it's still there. Tours tend to get the traffic of a good banner ad... abysmal. Still, it's good to offer help to those who seek it.
In my case I'm thwarted by the move of search (#6) from the left (common not only to the old netflix but to many other of my regularly visited sites such as amazon) to the right. I'm sure someone had a deep and passionate argument about how having the search box on the right was more ergonomic and intuitive, but damn if I don't keep looking for it on the left every time.
(There was a poster at this year's ia summit with typical location of things like shopping cart and search-- anyone have a link?)
Below we have the old netflix queue page and the new one. This is a page I spend a lot of time on, moving movies up and down the queue as my mood swings from serious to playful and my needs from blockbuster-stupid to intellectually challenging. I doubt I'm unusual in this pastime. Netflix's few drawbacks is you can't match film to mood easily.
There are two big changes in this page. One is the aqua-ization of the design. Everything is shiny 3-D macraphics. Why? Page was loading too fast? That fountain pen really enriches my renting experience! Those round tabs makes me feel so futuristic, like I'm in minority report!
I will admit that I have a personal aesthetic preference for the flat interface, and I really don't get what a 3-d tab brings to the experience. But then, OSX leaves me vaguely seasick, and when my XP machine arrived, I spent a hunk of time removing the fisher-price interface and returning to the simple "windows classic". This is my caveat... I like flat. Still, I do suspect this design will look dated pretty fast.
Moving beyond the veneer, let's consider use. This page is a highly utilitarian one. Why add visuals that don't help? The fountain pen neither helps in wayfinding nor explains how to use the page, nor sets the tone for the task. It bespeaks a designer's struggle digging through clip-art seeking an image that represents managing a queue of movies-- maybe the solution was no image?
Is an image necessary on this page at all? Setting the tone of the service's brand seems far more appropriate on the home page, perhaps lightly across the browse pages. But once you get to a page the regular committed user accesses again and again, why not make it lightweight and swift, with no unnecessary elements?
One thing the image does do is tie the tabs into the page. Often tabs are tossed on top of an interface like a hat, and have no visual connection with the page they modify. This undermines their power-- the ability to show state and provide both location and alternatives. The new tabs are far better tied to the pages they modify than the old buttonettes.
Are tabs the right metaphor for Netflix? On the web, you see two uses for tabs. the old software metaphor, which is different views of the same thing, and the new/old folder metaphor, top-level groupings of items. Amazon uses tabs in this way, as do most.
Netflix is using tabs to indicate the three different tasks a user might accomplish on their site, an atypical use for tabs. Tabs are probably the wrong widget, then. But a little rebel within whispers "I bet they tested great in usability."
Another big change you'll notice is the removal of the left-hand navigation. I'm going to assume they looked at the number of clicks this received, and decided that it was not serving any purpose beyond noise. On the other-hand, its removal basically renders this page a dead end. You've tweaked your queue, you are satisfied the right films are lined up to arrive... now what? What does the user want to do next?
My answer is usually
1. Find more movies on netflix
2. Go to IMDB and read up on a movie, or find suggestions for another.
3. Leave to do something else.
You can no longer easily do any of these on this page. Why not offer movie recommendations here? Why not do a deal with IMDB? Why not take overture text-link ads to take advantage of an exit point?
I think Amazon is the master of the "no dead-ends" philosophy. Every click provides you with a thousand other tempting offers, until you enter the check out tunnel. Netflix has got your money, the best thing they can do is make sure you view them as an indispensable part of your existence. Part of that means making sure you have a rich queue of movies so you never sit at home with no red envelope, wondering what you are paying for.
A particularly good review in Boxes and Arrows this week, Report Review: Nielsen/Norman Group's Usability Return on Investment In which messieurs Merholz and Hersch take NNG to task
"the report methodology is so fundamentally flawed that any financial analyst worth her salt would immediately question its findings."
Bad statistics analysis/ DOE procedure is probably the worst critique that could be levels against something that purports to be quantifiable. The book might still be useful, perhaps, if one wanted to wave it about while talking to management since the Nielsen norman names are two of the few known outside the practice. But then, you'd be chancing the managers might read it and then you'd look foolish. There was much grumbling around Y! when our copy made the rounds. I still feel Cost Justifying Usability is the place to place your dough, be you designer or evaluator. After all, after usability testing reveals the problems, it's design that fixes them. This marriage is the magic.
Larger questions arise, of course. As the "ROI us" movement gains steam, a few dissenters start to push back. Designers are often once removed from critical design decisions, and have trouble owning fully the results of their work (sometimes to their benefit, sometimes to their detriment). Design also often results in effects that are subtle and hard to measure, or need be measured over longer stretches of time-- something hard to convince people to do in this ever faster paced environment.
Intense and frequent measuring also can result in making design a slave to tiny jumps in quick-numbers, and an attention to the page as a series of tiny components to be optimized. Looking at Amazon lately, I wonder if their increasingly disjointed design is a result of their A-B testing. Sometimes you have to step back from the daily data and look at the design system, and make the leap of faith that a coherent design will make a long term positive user experience and go for it.
Now obviously one can choose ot measure this too. One can run longer tests, and discover if what I've said is true. But will companies do so? If you practice data-driven design, what data drives you? Is it the right data? Is it enough data? Is it good data?
from pricelink.co.uk's html newsletter:
Obviously not as naughty as say, real's hidden subscriptions, but still plenty bad. Blue on blue for the unsubscribe?
A reader has a research opportunity for DMOZ/Open Directory Project users. If you regularly use DMOZ (this includes the Google Directory) to search for or browse websites, she'd like to talk with you. She's also interested in talking with you if you currently are or have been an editor for DMOZ or any other open directory. Contact me if you are interested in participating in this research. I'll pass your information on to the reader. By the way, she'll be able to offer some money for participating in this research.
Email dmoz@eleganthack.com (I've set up a forward)
Upon reading Employee Directory Search: Resolving Conflicting Usability Guidelines (Alertbox Feb. 2003)
"In recent studies on how employees in a range of companies use their intranets, an important guideline emerged: intranets should provide a dedicated search box for finding phone numbers and other employee directory information. Preferably, this employee directory box should appear on every page of the intranet, and it should definitely appear on the top levels of an enterprise portal and on the main intranet homepage.
That's one usability guideline.
At the same time, one of the most established usability guidelines for search is to provide no more than a single search box on the homepage. Competing homepage search boxes are confusing, and advanced search should be relegated to a secondary position inside the site to avoid seducing users away from the simple search, which they're more likely to use correctly.
That's another, conflicting, usability guideline. "
Mr. Nielsen goes on to be puzzled as to what to do, and resolves it by recommending emperical thinking and human observation. I think he's talking about design....
About a year ago, when Nielsen's book on homepages came out, a friend told me his employer's site was 90% compliant, and 100% unusable. How were the guidelines useful in redesigning that page?
I've also heard it said guidelines are helpful for beginner designers, before they get experience.
You know what? I think beginner designers are the ones who should be kept away from guidelines, as far as possible. Instead, they should work on looking at usable designs, and designing, and seeing their designs tested and retested (in the words of the great homer simpson, "lather rinse repeat. always repeat.").
ON the Yahoo intranet homepage, we've got a search box, a dropdown with "employee, text, and conference room" as the choices and a submit button. Occasionally I make a mistake and search for text in the employee database, but 9 times out of ten, I'm looking up an employee and for the odd times I'm looking for a form or a policy, I do usually catch the dropdown before my pinkie makes a dive for the enter key (they have a mind of their own, those digits).
Still better would be to run queries against each database and return answers from each, rather like amazon does... most of the time amazon knows if you are searching for a book or a CD, and when they don't, they offer you choices from each category. Why not apply this tidy solution to the intranet problem?
This is called design. Thinking about a problem, and thinking up answers by looking at the world around us: design. Blindly adhering to guidelines is not design. Looking at guidelines and comparing them to the world and deciding if they are applicable to your unique situation: design.
Don't get me wrong, I think guidelines are valuable. Often I come up against a usability problem and say to myself, "Hey it's a proximity problem" and can fix it easily. But those guidelines have meaning to me because they represent compressed experience.
A guideline-- such as "Place related items in close proximity to each other"-- is simple a mnemonic for the hundreds of times I've seen users in a lab not notice something because it's on the other side of the page from the thing they were looking at. The guideline really falls down when the subtleties of the rule are revealed... I've noticed that a line between two items is a hard divider for the user's eyes. One might think that the proximity rule would keep this problem from happening-- if they are close, they are associated, right? But I know proximity isn't just physical space, but also visual structure of that space. A line between two items is the same to a user's perception of relatedness as an inch of whitespace.
When I worked on the book, I tried to get around the problem for guidelines needing context by using lots of examples and stories. But I wonder if this can make up for the value of watching users use your designs.
I would say if you are a junior designer the three things you can do to become great are:
1. Look at great design. Collect books, use other people's websites that have been earmarked as good but also winning book and industrial design, visit museums. All media is relevant.
2. Watch every single session of usability testing you can, no matter how redundant the problems may seem. Sometimes the fifth user will suddenly surprise you. Take notes (it will help keep your attention high) and sketch little design solution-ideas to the problems you see in the margins of those notes.
3. Design all the time. Design for fun, design for work. Design a homepage, Design a page for your mom, your sister, your favorite charity... design design design.
And above all, take every guideline with a grain of salt. A guideline is a starting place, not an ending place for thinking. Ask yourself questions after reading an Alertbox-- "Why would a dedicated search box for employee search be valuable? Maybe that is the most common type of search. Hey, maybe I'll check the logs. Hey, maybe I'll interview some employees, and see what they search for. Hey, maybe I can design it this way....." then test and watch.
Mr. Nielsen says "The usability field is one in which empirical observation and theoretical analysis reinforce each other."
I'd add that the design field is one where thought and empathy lead to more satisfying products. Guidelines are useful when the reference thinking, but dangerous when they shut it down.
Ziya points out Fortune.com - Alsop on Infotech - Hollywood's Latest Flop
"It's clear that the studios' motivation in designing MovieLink is fear of piracy. But they forgot to make the service usable, appealing, or compelling. So MovieLink will fail, people will argue that you can't sell digital content on the Internet--and the studios will have proved nothing. "
from since1968 :: Steve Krug Interview, upon being asked about so many quality websites coming from amateur enthusiasts rather than professionals:
"I'm afraid I'm not very big on calculating correlations between things. But it reminds me of a line from an underground comic called The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers from back in the 1970's: "Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope." Having a small budget and someone on the project with clout who really cares about whether users have a good experience--which is often the case with an amateur site--will often get you much farther than a big budget and no one guiding the whole thing.
(On the other hand, while a big budget doesn't ensure usability, it doesn't preclude it, either. Rich people can get into heaven; it's just trickier.)"
Jakob's most recent In the Future, We'll All Be Harry Potter (Alertbox Dec. 2002) is a pleasent little riff on Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's quote "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It's a nice change of pace from the sturm and drang we've been seeing lately, and is marred only by the somewhat threatening last paragraph.
NNGroup and Me : A Tale of Two Tickets illustrates that sometimes user-centered isn't as important as customer-centered.
Universal Usability in Practice is a nice cheatsheet for figuring out how to design for different user types.
Zen Haiku: Password Previewing Tools version 2.2 is out. He continues to refine his tool for password choices. I rather wish he'd continue-- I wonder what other issues folks face in password selection? Perhaps dealing with passwords that require a number and a capital (a common restriction)?
turns out Amazon.com's wishlist address is not connnected to your address book, so when i updated my addressbook removing old addresses, i had no idea presents were still going to an old address. I'm not feeling very loving toward amazon right now.
One of my pet peeves is the little stars in password fields. As you all know, I am typing-challenged. I can't tell you how often I make password mistakes, with no way to catch them since I can't see the damn things. It has always struck me as engineering paranoia turned into a usability issue.
Password Usability & Typability is working on a solution...
He also offers excellent advice on password rules.
The flame bait of the moment, usability must die has a page on why AlertBox is nothing but NNG propaganda: The Day Alertbox Died.
Unfortunately his statistical evidence is based on a poor assumption... that how many links and where they link is a representation of how effective an objective critique of usability Nielsen is. That would be like saying Metafilter is more objective than the New York Times, because it has more outward links. A link clearing-house is not the same as a content producer, and alertbox should not be judged on the same scale as the very excellent but very different webword.
None the less, alertbox has been all over the map lately, from wildly inaccurate to insightful and useful. not sure what is going on in the head of Nielsen.
CHI-WEB archives -- September 2002, week 3 (#15) holds a wonderful post in which Manu Sharma takes apart the latest alertbox.
from CHI-WEB archives -- August 2002, week 3 (#8)
"People talk the way they talk. You can't hold back changes in language. It is a mistake to try. Moreover, my entire design philosophy is based around the concept of learning from users. When people use a word inappropriately, but consistently, it means that there is a gap that needs to be filled, that no word exists to describe the concept needed and the old word has been expanded to cover the gap. So I have given in: Affordances covers the concept of perceptible signs about the meanings of interface elements."
my hero.
CafePress.com's forgot password page is the first good atempt I've spotted to help those folks who not only forget their password, they forget their email as well.
Seen other good implementations of this?
On the off chance you haven't read Emotion and Design please go do so now. The Don of Usability rips down the curtain someone has erected between beauty and use, and placed them side by side in value, as they ought to be.
"My studies of cognition showed that color computer displays (or color TV, for that matter) offered no information advantage over black and white. But I would never go back to black and white computer displays or black and white television. So too should we not go back to ugly, ill-designed things. Heretical or not, it is time to have more pleasure and enjoyment in life. Although the cognitive analyses of usability and function are important, so too is the affective analysis. Let the future of everyday things be ones that do their job, that are easy to use, and that provide enjoyment and pleasure."
Tragically this is accompanied by a recently added large ugly yellow table in the middle of what is otherwise a lovely front page. Did The Don's design team not provide an extensible design with a style guide? it's a shame.
dive into mark may be the best guide out there to accessibility, but I wouldn't know since when I got there I had no idea where I was, what was going on or where to start. Like Bloggus Caesari coming late to the party means it's almost impossible to catch up (no matter how many jell-o shots you do).
As these sites gain popularity and fame as their body of content grows and word spreads, it becomes more and more important for them to take into account new visitors who will need to catch up.
A "start here" button is all it would take.
User Empowerment and the Fun Factor (Alertbox July 2002) is poetry:
"Once we achieve ease of use, we'll need additional usability methods to further strengthen joy of use. "
Say it with me:
"strengthen joy of use"
Why is Delta Dental Plan of California such a bad site?
Other than ugly, badly executed (check out those poorly crushed images) and cluttered, it is nearly impossible to find basic information like copayments or yearly fees. Hasn't the web been around long enough that huge million dollar organizations should have no excuse for bad websites? Aren't there enough books, enough talented consultancies, enough articles online that any professional site should have at least a baseline of usability?
Read Measuring the Value of Usability Engineering and consider the IA community's latest obsession with ROI.
I still think hard number ROI is a mirage, not an oasis.
Now, god knows I can barely multiply and divide without resorting to toes or a calculator, but even I know that this train of logic is poor. From Improving Usability Guideline Compliance (Alertbox June 2002), Nielsen says that he looked at 20 sites last year, 15 this year, and there is 4% better compliance with usability guidelines and therefore the internet will be fixed in 2017?!?!?!
Jumping Jesus on a pogostick.
First of all... 15 sites??? 15 sites??? I spent the other day looking at a bunch of websites that sell music looking for a good one to take screenshots for That Damn Book(tm) and most of them flaunted not only the usability guidelines, but those of good taste and common sense.
I don't know much about the infamous guidelines he uses, but I do know that the internet is too much in flux right now to hope for stable standards. Are the guidelines changing also? And honestly, do guidelines really make usable sites? Wouldn't it be better to combine testing with heuristic evaluations, if you are making grand pronouncements like "the average e-commerce site complies with 49% of established usability guidelines." The average e-comerce site...he hasn't even seen enough sites to even know what the average music e-commenrce site looks like (I do, and I'm 49% offended, and 87% despondant over the state of them)
The whole thing makes me deeply uneasy. And "International Websites lag behind"... he looked at six! Six sites? What if he looked at the wrong six sites? It's like saying I looked at 15 American women and 6 foreign women and American woman are much better looking. If someone said that to you, you'd wonder what women he was looking at... and what women he missed.
This article gives me the screaming willies. maybe I am way off base, but this seems like the most irresponsible thing that the Dane has put out. God forbid anyone read it and believe the conclusions.
Am I on drugs here? Any statisticians out there who can back me up? or prove me wrong. Hey, either way.
damn, this is an abuse of the bold tag.
Usability Professionals: Stay Prepared for Business Waves
I know you've read and memorized Jakob's column on how people skim and don't read but use some common sense! This is nearly unreadable. It's like I'm telling you a story and SHOUTING every third WORD!
graf snarf grumph.
Today Amazon introduced the soon-to-be standard dancing tab with hairy feet. Yes, another exciting innovation that will spread across websites like wildfire. 
I should have smelled trouble when the gold box showed up. I think I remember the gold box from digging through my publisher's clearing house packet. I've finally learned to stop clicking it. All it ever offers me is blenders. Oh, Amazon, I thought you knew me better than that.
The final insult is the message center. I thought, "hey they've been managing my friends. Perhaps they have decided to create a special email for Amazonia, the community that has sprung up around people who like the same stuff." But no, it's just spam! and does this mean they don't still send me spam in my regular email box? Nope, it means I get spam everywhere. It's like getting a big brown box from Amazon, opening it all excited-like, and discovering it's full of direct mail. bah.
If you run usability tests, you need to read Usability Testing: You Get What You Pay For. I'm not sure about many of the conclusions she drew from the fact that different usability companies charge differently and find different problems (Jared, maybe you have some thoughts on this). It seems to mostly be "People are charging too little so therefore they must be doing it wrong." I have no doubt a lot of people are doing it wrong; I've seen most of the mistakes she lists as well. But I suspect there is more to the difference in results and cost than just wrong and right.
Her assessment of common mistakes made by novice usability testers and how to correct them is dead on. It is well worth reading and seriously asking yourself Am I guilty of this? It's rare to find a practical article with applicable advice. This is one. Reminds me of one of my favorite books, By People, For People. If you don't have this book, I encourage you to pick it up. It deals with many of the questions Mayhew brings up like sample size and how to avoid influencing Think Aloud protocols.
From the Fireworks tutorial on animation:
"Animated graphics add an exciting, sophisticated look to your Web site. In Fireworks, you can create animated graphics with banner ads, logos, and cartoons that move. For example, you can make your company mascot dance across a page while the logo fades in and out. "
Yeah, that does add class.
Chris MacGregor's inspired response to Don Norman's intellegent explaination of the flash turn around issue should be required reading for anyone in web development. Especially consultants.
(reread Flash 99% bad, if you don't know what I'm talking about. esp. the ammendment)
My little site often goes after usability blunders like a dog on a hambone, and I know as I've begun job hunting I've been restraining myself-- slightly.
But is this a good idea? On one hand, I'm not a professional critic and I don't get paid to be objective. On the other hand, how can I expect you to ever trust me if I don't keep my nose clean (or get it dirty-- not sure -- damn metaphors). At least you should be able to trust me to be opinionated.
The ammendment on the 99% bad alertbox reads more than a little like a backpedal. What does that do to the alertbox's trustworthyness? It makes you wonder what are the stories that don't get told at NNG. And other consultant companies.
It also reveals the price of being bombastic and absolute. If that orginal column had claimed merely that Flash was being misused, the current alliance would go down easier with the community(s). But the attention grabbing "99% bad" that got people to the site, and probably caught Macromedia's attention, is also the reason this job is going down so badly.
What can NNG do? Here is a chance to make real change. I don't blame them for making what is the right decision: to try to help what they view as a troubled product. But they are also going to have to live with the skeptiscm and catcalls.
That's the price of guruhood.
I agree with all Jen's pet peeves, but especially Thumbnail Let-down.
????
I just read Design lacking in e-tail sites in which LL Bean is said to be a good site for usability.
Well. huh. That LL Bean?
We used LL Bean and Kinkos.com as sites to test in Carbon IQ's Discount Usability classes, and you would not believe how many usability problems cropped up. About twice as many as Kinkos.com.
If NNG is evaluating with their guidelines, they need to retinker. Because even novices could uncover a number of huge usability issues on LLBean. com. Hop over there, and I bet you can too.
I was intensely disappointed by Homepage Usability, and haven't gotten around to articulating why. sp!ked's article "Excuse-ability" does the job for me:
"For web geeks, it's fun reading what Nielsen has to say about websites that we regularly use, and that some of us might even have designed. But on closer inspection, the book reduces web design to a mundane level.
While some of the book's guidelines are common sense, others are banal. For example, 'show the company name and/or logo in a reasonable size and noticeable location' - and 'don't use clever phrases and marketing lingo that make people work too hard to figure out what you're saying'. This doesn't express a high opinion of businesses or internet users."
I really liked "Designing Web Usability" and thought it taught people to think. But Homepage usability isn't on the same par. The on thing I did liek was the set of heuristics in the front-- might be a nice tool for some consultants.
What have others thought of it?
I know I've noted tis before, but since we're talking large font versions..
The Sacramento Bee -- toolbar is another example of a tool for changing fonts.
a confusing, mysterious tiny tool. But we're moving in the right direction.
My biggest question is how can be let people with poor eyesite be aware of the large font version without overwhelming normally sighted folks? it's nice design challenge.
How can I not like an article whose number one bit of advice is "hire a Usability Specialist"
Win Consumers with Better Usability
From IT ARCHITECT ADVISOR: Create Usable Web Sites - - ADVISOR.com - -
"Hambrose says today's Web site design mentality is analogous to what occurred during the Victorian Era, when designers added elements to furniture, for example, "just because they could do it," even if those design elements didn't serve any valuable function. "
Argh, flash, run run!
I'm pondering over a new concept I call "fear of design." More on this later...
Q: So how did you get people to accept your ideas?
A: The same way I do things now. I just go around and keep saying it over and over again.
After reading User Interface Engineering -- "The Customer Sieve" Article I thought again about the idea of mapping customer losses across a site mpa, a la Tufte's beloved Napolean's March. I tried looking for the "Ask E.T." comment where someone suggested it but was unsucessful. Maybe I dreamed it....
Still. Kewl!
from Human Factors International
"We will add SCROLL BAR PLACEMENT to the long list of really bad decisions that have become standard; and therefore you will use. "
sigh.
At the airport I discovered a "webcenter" (it was next to one of the few working outlets at SFO)
The page looks pretty good, no? Good lables, good IA, good looking... and it gives me what I need: information on how to get to and from the airport. 
Waitaminute-- my dainty lil fingers don't fit on the links... good thing I didn't trim my nails....
I guess a kiosk isn't just a website on a booth....
Brenda Laurel speaks
at stanford today-- swing by, or watch online.
Telling the Truth is an article about the lies sites tell their users. It doesn't really matter if these are really technical glitches, or confusion in communication or editorial mistakes-- to the end user they are lies, and one never trusts a proven liar....
This isn't on the site yet (not that I can find) and it looks quite valuable so I'll broadcast here. I saw Jared at Macromedia world and was very impressed with his new findings. He's always an entertaining speaker, and it was pretty cool to get some insight on UIE's discoveries.
"BayCHI-East talk
Title: Designing for Revenue: Using Research to Fulfill Business Goals
Speaker: Jared Spool
Date & Time: Tuesday February 5th, 7.00 p.m.
Location: Sibley Auditorium, 230 Bechtel Engineering Center
University of California, Berkeley
Talk Abstract:
Web site designers tell us that they have thousands of ideas on how to
improve their web site. But how do these designers determine which
improvements will actually help the business achieve it's goals? New
research from User Interface Engineering shows that careful measurement and
observation can demonstrate exactly how this happens. In this presentation,
Jared will show you how an e-commerce site can change its design to
generate more impulse purchases. He'll demonstrate how designers can change
the way categories are displayed to dramatically increase the site's
revenues. Jared will also discuss how other types of sites can use these
same principles to better achieve their goals."
Can Jobs "Think Outside the Pretty Box"? In which Raskin talks about how the new mac really is just another pretty face. When will the thinking differently commence?
I bought this book at an amazingly large used bookstore down in Palo Alto called "Book Buyers" (next to Printer's Ink), and got to read it over my flight to and from Portland.
Design by People for People is a terrific little book full of useful gems for people faced with the questions that arise from regular usability testing: how many participants, when to intervene in a usability test, effective think-aloud methods. However this book is written in such a straightforward and engaging manner, it's far less painful than digging through academic screeds.
It also looks at consulting issues (not to be missed -- Rubin's essay on Authentic Consulting) and even experience design.
It's not a book for you if you have never done usability testing before.. Rubin’s Handbook is better for that. But if you want to refine your skills, definitely check it out.
lately i've noticed a trend-- many of my "innie" friends are adding usability testing to their job descriptions, and calling me up for tips. "Usability - Out-sourced or In-house?" is a pretty good article on the pluses and perils of this, though I smell a wiff of fear for their jobs in the essay...
A short piece on Describing links more clearly describes a phenomena we've seen at IQHQ several times in testing: links with modifiers are far more effective than stand-alone.
I have insomnia, and am reading the latest alertbox Site Map Usability. You read it too, and let me know what you think.
My reaction was basically that he has got the core issue wrong: yes a site map might be useful, but does it have to be in the traditional form of a dedicated page that lists every single page in the site? and how well does the user have to be able to picture the IA to use the site?
What is the nature of a site map? A display of the contents of the site, displaying breadth and range. I remember Peter telling me that the only reason epinions had a yahoo-style directory on the front page was to demonstrate the range of content they had. it wasn't a particularly useful navigation scheme otherwise.
So maybe we just need to rethink our concept of a site map... maybe it's like xplane's global bottom-of-the-page map. or maybe it's simply an index page, or a yahoo-directory.
When we make maps, we don't always map every stone in the path-- why should a site map be different? Perhaps a useful map that is accessible and grokable by users is more like the wall maps of the world on my homeroom walls as I grew up in Iowa-- not one showed my home town.
(Actually I was happy if they showed Iowa. You are somewhere!)
He does say a site map should be two-and-a-half screen, but gives no advice on how to accomplish it. Perhaps suggesting something like "only two levels of hierarchy" might stop some clever folks from using 6 point type to keep their site within jakobian limits.
So what is the appropriate level of detail. That should be decided site-by-site basis, in a collaborative effort between designer and human-factors specialist.
All in all, the man is quotable: "If you wait long enough, you might become King of Sweden, but we can't wait for Microsoft as our only hope for improved website navigation."
Okay, off to bed.
Homepage Improvement - wring more results from your website
lists 10 good resolutions for improving your site in the new year. reading through, I was amazed how many classic usability issues there were-- almost all would be revealed in testing. Then I noticed they were gleaned from Jakob's new Homepage Usability book.
Has anyone read it? worth getting?
or at least for an alertbox: DVD Menu Design (guest column by Don Norman, Alertbox Dec. 2001)
It's actually refreshing to hear Don's gentle informal voice. Jakob and Don's writing styles are quite alike, yet the tone is very different. Don has a breezy quality-- you half expect he's sitting in your living room with you, explaining why the thing works or doesn't from the couch. Jakob is the graduate teacher you've run into in the hallways between classes, and while he's also human enough to tell anecdotes, he's also always on the job.
Anyhow, good column. DVD design is clearly a messy new field, and opportunities for good interaction designers and UI designers shall abound. Scroll down to his six tips, at least.
visited usable design
who is sporting this sentence "Our raison d'ętre is to ensure that the interactive experiences we develop propagate the maximum number of target users including the needs of people with hearing and sight disabilities." in miniscule (9pt?) un-resizable type.
blah blah blah
the usability special issue seems like more of a andy rooney special issue. still fun, though.
An interface only a mother could love
"In the 21st Century, bad user interface design is an endemic problem. And, when it comes to cell phone interfaces, neither text-based nor interactive voice menu systems are immune to the disease. Quite the opposite, in fact!"
Health care Web sites that could use a thorough exam
"The page I was redirected to is a blank white page -- the only indication that I'd gotten anywhere was this background change. "
"Usability may sound mystifying to some people, and some best-selling books may champion the obscurity of this subject, but there?s really nothing too complex about it. Usability is the extent to which a system supports its users in completing their tasks efficiently, effectively, and satisfactorily - which may also include the experience of aesthetic pleasure."
from Inf@Vis! Magazine
"The variability of human perception, the multiplicity of factors that play a part in a test with real users and the diversity of styles and web sites makes it advisable to weigh up any "rule of thumb" with extreme caution. The construction of a scientific theory about Usability is still years away."
Understanding the phenomenon of banner blindness
"It has been observed that contradictory results have been found regarding the perception of banner advertisements on the Internet. While some studies found that recall and recognition scores for banners were at a satisfactory level, others observed that banners are almost generally overlooked. In this study, it is argued that the opposing results might be explained by differences in navigation style (aimless browsing versus goal directed searching). "
marketing prof's is full of goodies today. from No Thanks, I Don't Want Any Personalization
a user says "I lie. And, I don't feel guilt or remorse. When it comes to giving out personal information online, I have the morality of Satan's spawn.
Sometimes I'm Candice and sometimes I go by my soap opera diva name, Ms. Styles.
I usually live in Beverly Hills because I know the zip code is 90210. When asked about income, I am a student who makes $0 to $12,000 a year.
Lying online is not wrong. It's survival."
I have seen this is test after test after test. people give bogus information unless they think it will be useful to them, such as when entering contensts or when buying. otherwise, they don't bother. it's part laziness, part suspicion. i know one user who puts _@_.com in all email form fields. Just enough to validate....
while liquid design is important in websites, it is 6 gazillion times more important in html email. I can't read this.
Considering all the different email clients, and all the different configuration each email client can have, html email is a gamble. Liquid design helps stack the deck in your favor.
to the sneak peek treat
marc takeno writes:
"Hi,
Just wondering what your take is on Amazon's lack of "exit" indications on any of its pages.
It takes a bit of figuring out that you need to go back to the home page and click on "If you're not Marc Takeno, _click here_". Most people can figure it out, but then again... a lot of people can't.
I know it's to keep people in the Amazon cookie loop, but I think they should make it more obvious where you can click to exit if you're on a nonsecure computer, such as a lab or public access term. Just my opinion.
-Marc"
I asked him if I could reprint his note, because i think the question of exiting pages and exit behavior is an interesting one. thoughts, kids?
Moving WebWord > Understanding Design Misfits is an good paper to read to get some thinking going on why design goes peculiar.
I'm not sure if it was quite fully thought out enough to be a paper-- it feels more like a long blog-- but that doesn't mean that some of the core ideas aren't excellent.
Personally I wrote the headings of a few of the more powerful notions on my whiteboard so I can evaluate against these criteria.. is the design insensitive? vestigal? over-adapted...?
Just stumbled over the PDC 2000 - the Participatory Design Conference, and wondered if anyone had attended, and how it was. It looks pretty dang cool!
Usage Modes that Work Together (Web Techniques, Dec 2001) is an article that helps slice up the view of the homogenous web user.
Considering interface standards on the web
Making the World a Happier Place, One Web Site at a Time
An interview of Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir concerning their new title, "Homepage Usability."
from You'd Think They'd Learn: Bad Design Kills Web Sites (washingtonpost.com)
"One benefit of the downturn is that companies have realized they can't continue to treat a large portion of their users like dirt," declared (Jakob Nielsen)
‘Discount’ user testing under fire
"It has become almost a truism that tests involving five different users will reveal more than 80% of problems with a design and that the law of diminishing returns means tests with further users reveal less and less useful information. ...
However, weaknesses in this approach were exposed along two dimensions by conference speakers. First, Dye, group manager MS Marketing Intelligence, warned that analyzing individual features of a complex products may improve aspects locally while ignoring the needs of the user. He spoke of the obstacles to better design: the challenge of understanding human activity; software technologies being difficult to build and our poor knowledge of work requirements and goals. "
This is an important article. We need to reshape our attitudes toward discount usability. Not so long ago I was lucky enough to do discount usability and conduct a heuristic evaluation, and the HE was much more effective at revealing a breadth of issues, while the guerilla testing could only scratch at the surface of the product's problems.
That said, having the developers sit in on the sessions made a huge difference in getting changes made.
Because it is seen as less formal, discount usability is often plagued with problems of carelessness and inexperience, including
When it is done right, it is more effective at flushing out design disasters during the design than evaluating the entire system pre-release. It can be a swift way to shake designers out of design mode, and reveal usage-related problems. it can reveal mental models, show design advantages and disadvantages, and is thus great when snuck in before conducting a redesign. But used before shipping a hefty complex piece of software? or before launching a thousand page site with rich functionality? Here you want to rigors of formal usability to assure your company's reputation won't go to sea when you ship.
in my personal opinion, discount usability when done correctly is an excellent design tool and a poor evaluation tool.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on this matter... what problems have you seen with discount usability testing? What wins has it given you?
I guess when you've been doing this long enough, you start to see common problems crop up again and again. Noel pulls back the curtain with an interesting post on AA's new metanav.
Eloquent rant onTextism about you know who....
End of Homemade Websites (Alertbox Oct. 2001)
He's at it again: Jakob starts with an outrageous statement, follows up with some uncited statistics, throws in a bad and excessive metaphor (bake your own bricks indeed!), moves to a left-handed pitch of his research product, and then shows that he doesn't get out much (heard of Bigstep, J?) and finishes with a conclusion built on a whole lotta nothing. Perhaps the increased publishing schedule is getting to him, but this column needs to go back to the drawing board. Or if Mr. Neilsen wants to throw out his theories half-baked, he should get a blog.
Compare it to this small gem where Mr. Neilsen puts his finger on a key problem... not sexy, but needed.
Is there no middle ground?
Deborah J. Mayhew points out you get what you pay for: discount usability will not do the entire job. She goes on to say that guru's also aren't worth the money. While I do think she generalizes a bit, I agree with her on several points, especially the fact that websites are far more complicated and need more extensive testing beyond typical discount methods.
However, there are aspects of discount I still think are right on, including ditching labs and using smaller samples when time is limited. Some usability is still better than none. I think the key problem is that discount usability should have been a fix for projects with tiny budgets and timelines-- instead they've become the defacto standard, and that isn't the way a grown-up company should go.
Three Questions For Your Web Agency
"Everyone's a usability expert nowadays. But does your potential web agency really take usability seriously? Three simple questions can help anyone choosing an agency find out before it's too late..."
Mary Deaton looks at automating usability
Tog looks at the way airports have changed post sept. 11th, and how they should change.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for September 16
"New mobile devices and services are more realistic and useful than last year's models, and will likely expand mobile device adoption. Design usability and simplicity are key, particularly for the automotive market where complexity can be dangerous."
Evaluation Methods in Usability Testing
Or, how to tell that you have a usability problem before it gets to the field.
Guerrilla usability mary Deaton tells it like it is:
"Before we look at when and how to test, let's list some guiding principals:
Ben Henick, driven into a frenzy by the shoddy whitheouse.gov, catalogs its failings with virulent accurancy.
webword points me at another useful tool for our toolbox, the Fly on the Wall observation method.
Ben Henick, driven into a frenzy by the shoddy whitheouse.gov, catalogs its failings with virulent accurancy.
Apply Usability Methodologies in Intranet Information Architecture in a Real World Context Part II
"A user needs analysis is crucial to the user-centred design process. Identifying issues in the requirements phase can save companies up to 100 times over what it would cost the company to fix the same problems after the system has been delivered. Once completed, a UNA report will be the blue print from which the production team can work, ensuring that the stakeholders' intranet's goals are married to the needs of the end users."
thanks iaslash
