Confusability

Rosenfeld Media - The Missing Sitemap

This morning I received my copy of "Web Form Design" from Rosenfeld Media less than 2 weeks after I ordered it, which isn't bad for a transatlantic delivery.

I have been checking the status of my order for the past week and I was getting rather annoyed by not being able to find a direct link to the "My Orders" page on the Rosenfeld Media site. I found that I had to go to the Rosenfeld Media site and pretend to order a book so that I could get to the link to the "My Orders" page. Whilt I was at work last week I also used the same convoluted navigation path to get to my digital download link for the book. If wonder if Rosenfeld Media are seeing a lot of abandoned shopping carts because of  people using this method of getting to their Rosenfeld orders page?

I had a couple of hours free today, so I decided to have a go at designing my ideal version of a Sitemap for Rosenfeld Media.

The natural navigation of the Rosenfeld Media sits is defined by the top navigation bar which lists the main sections as "ABOUT", "PUBLICATIONS", "PUBLISH WITH US", "EVENTS" and "UX ZEITGEITS".

I renamed and re-ordered these sections to be "Books", "About", "Publish With Us", "Events" and "UX Zeitgeist". Using mixed-case titles makes it easier to read the list of items and I prefer "Books" to "Publications" as it is a better description of what Rosenfeld Media actuallt sells. These top-level options still didn't solve my problem of getting to "My Orders", so I introduced a new top-level item of "Store" which left my top-level navigation items looking like this: "Books", "Store", "About", "Publish With Us", "Events" and "UX Zeitgeist".

I then turned my attention to the detail of the "Books" section of my sitemap. I didn't like the fact that "Web Form Design" appeared after "Mental Models" as I feel that the most recent book should appear at the top of the list. Once the books for sale have been listsed it does make sense to list the "books in progress" in the order that they are due to be published, This means that once "Search Analytics" is published it will move from number 3 in the list to number 1.

The "Published" and "Soon to be published" books are also differentiated by their "action phrase". The published books have a "Buy Now" action phrase, whilst the other books have a "Notify Me" action phrase.

I spent about an hour trying out different layouts for the book item link lists before settling on the version you can see online.

One of the difficult decisions was where to put the links to the Customer Forums to the two published books. It seemed to make send to put the individual links next to their respective book items, but after trying out a number of prototypes it made more sense to put these links in the "Store" section as they would not become really useful until you had actually ordered a book.

I then went through the sitemap and added links to RSS feeds where appropriate. Designing and producing this sitempa actually took about four hours and I spent as much time deciding what to leave out of the sitemap as to what to put into it.

Even if you don't think your site needs a sitemap you should always produce one just to make sure that your information architecture model makes sense. This exercise suggests that Rosenfeld Media should add a "Store" item to the top level of their navigation and it would be interesting to know why this hasn't made it into the design of the site.

Rosenfeld Media - The Missing Sitemap

If you like this you might also be interested in Simply Google.

Rosenfeld Media get sorted

The second publication from Rosenfeld Media has hit the shelves:

Web Forms: Filling in the Blanks

Luke Wroblewski's book will provide everything you wanted to know and more about designing effective and engaging Web forms that optimize these key customer interactions. Rosenfeld Media, 2008. Read More >

I ordered the book from the RM web site and manged to complete my order in about 60 seconds because I had set up an account when I bought Mental Models last month. The re-ordering process is very well designed but I got a bit confused when I reviewed my orders.

My order for Menta Models in April showed as having a status of "Pending Shipment". I actually received the book a few days after I ordered it (very quick for a trans-atlantic order). If Rosenfeld Media thought that my order was "Pending Shipment" I would have expected them to chase the order by now. I expect that RM either ignore this status or it is incorrectly shown on the web site. Either way it would be helpful if the correct status was shown.

After I ordered Web Forms Design  I  looked at my digital purchase screen to find the link to my electronic version and was surprised to see both of my book purchases appearing under "Recent Digital Purchases" and "Historical Digital Purchases". However when I got the screenshot the next day the books only appeared in "Historical Digital Purchases". I suggest that RM drop the Recent/Historical sections and just show my digital purchases sorted with most recent at the top. It just doesn't feel right to see my most recent purchase at the bottom of my list.

However, as this is only the second book that RM have published they have got plenty of time to improve their "bookshelf" functionality as it won't really start to annoy me until I have bought my 5th or 6th RM book.

Anyway, that's enough of my complaining. I will wait for the postman to deliver my paper copy of the "soon to be definitive" book on web forms design.

"Luke Wroblewski has done the entire world a great favor by writing this book. Online forms are ubiquitous and ubiquitously annoying but they don't have to be. Wroblewski shows Web designers how to present forms that gather necessary information without unnecessarily badgering and annoying visitors. With deft explanations and clear examples, he presents a clear case for better Web forms and how to achieve them. This book will help you every day."
—Alan Cooper, Chairman, Cooper; author, The Inmates are Running the Asylum

Usability Review of a VCR with HCI Rap on YouTube

Usability Review of a VCR

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Knuth's advice for young people

Donald Knuth - Computer Scientist - Peoples Archive

If somebody said what advice would I give to a young person, they always ask that funny kind of a question. And I think one of the things that I would, that would sort of come first to me is this idea of, don't just believe that because something is trendy, that it's good. I'd probably go the other extreme where if something, if I find too many people adopting a certain idea I'd probably think it's wrong or if, you know, if my work had become too popular I'd probably think I'd have to change. That's of course ridiculous but I see the other side of it too often where people will do something against their own gut instincts because they think the community wants them to do it that way, so people will work on a certain subject even though they aren't terribly interested in it because they think that they'll get more prestige by working on it. I think you get more prestige by doing good science than by doing popular science because if you go with what you really think is important then it's a higher chance that it really is important in the long run and it's the long run which has the most benefit to the world. So usually when I'm writing a book or publishing a book it's different from books that have been done before because I feel there's a need for such a book, not because there was somebody saying please write such a book, you know, or that other people have already done that kind of thing. So follow your own instincts it seems to me is better than follow the herd. My friend Peter Wegner told me in the '60s that I should, for "The Art of Computer Programming" I shouldn't write the whole series first, I should first write a reader's digest of it and then expand on the parts afterwards. That would probably work for him better than me, much better, but I work in a completely different way. I have to see something to the point where I've surrounded it and totally understood it before I can write about it with any confidence and so that's the way I work, I don't want to write about a high level thing unless I've fully understood a low level thing. Other people have completely different strengths I know but for me, you know, I wrote a book about a few verses of the Bible, once I understood those verses and sort of everything I could find in the library about a small part of the Bible, all of a sudden I had firm pegs on which I could hang other knowledge about it. But if I went through my whole life only on, without any in depth knowledge of any part then it all seems to be flimsy and to me doesn't given me some satisfaction. The classic phrase is that liberal education is to learn something about everything and everything about something and I like this idea about learning everything about an area before you feel, if you don't know something real solid then you never have enough confidence. A lot of times I'll have to read through a lot of material just in order to write one sentence somehow because my sentence will then have, I'll choose words that make it more convincing than if I, if I really don't have the knowledge it'll somehow come out implicitly in my writing. These are little sort-of-vague thoughts that I have when reflecting over some of the directions that distinguish what I've done from what I've seen other people doing.

How to be a UX Team of One

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UX Zeitgeist on YouTube

Don gets riled

“I’m not designing … for other people.” I think that simple phrase speaks volumes. Thank goodness most companies recognize that this attitude is deadly.

Why is 37signals so arrogant? - Don Norman

Bin or Trash? - The Google Dilemma

I have noticed that my gmail account now displatys "Bin" as the link for my deleted items rather than "Trash".

I discovered that I could change it back by changing my "Google Mail display language" from "English (UK)" to "English (US)". It was apparent that Google had decided to respect my cultural differences and describe my deleted item container as a "Dustbin" rather than the americanized "Trash Can".

So why did Google make this change? I had assumed that they wanted to personalise the UK experience by replacing those pesky americanisms and make my feel a bit more cosy about using a google produce that cared about letting me know that they undertsand that us brits have different needs that our colonial cousins.

However, I really don't care if I call my deleted items "Trash" or "Bin", although if I was given the choice I  think that "Dustbin" would be more appropriate.

I thought that I would look at some other americanised google mail terms and see if these had been changed as well. On my gmail settings page I looked to see if the horrible "vacation" related options had been changed to the much more english "holiday". I was disappointed to see that I still had to experience the horrible vacation label.

Google, if you want to patronise me by renaming my "Trash"can as a Dust"bin" then please be consistent and change the other examples of US/UK alternatived. Or why not save us all a lot ob trouble and change the label to "Deleted" and change the "Vacation responder" to the "Gone Fishing" option instead.

Usability in the comedy world

We are used to seeing usability themes appear in Dilbert and we all remember the usability related laughter generated by the first HCI rap and the fantastic "Nothing but a UCD thang" - Pt1, Pt2, Pt3 Pt4. And of course Jabok Nielsen has been a target of spoofs for years.

But it now seems that usability themes are entering the mainstream comedy world. This week there awere two radio comedy programmes on BBC Radio 4 that were based around usability problems with technology.

On the 24th January the spoof radio phone in show "Down The Line" featured Technology and Communication as its theme. You can listen to this episode online for 7 days.

Last night, again by pure chance, I came across Down the Line and, looking it up on the internet this morning, was horrified to discover that I had already missed the whole of the first series. It's easily the best, and freshest, comedy show at the moment.

I don't know how many others feel the same about it, but the programme has at least been getting rave reviews on the "Cookd and Bombd" blog, where one listener describes it as "utterly fantastic".

"What's sad," the listener writes, "is that there's more talent, enthusiasm and humour going into this neglected little radio series than every current British TV comedy combined. As far as giving a comedic 'cross-section of Britain' goes, it does it about 500,000 times better than Little Britain could ever dream of. I absolutely adore this series, and I can't wait for the next episode tomorrow."

Down the Line is a spoof of radio phone-ins. Last night there was talk about bullying, and how it's a good way of toughening up kids, while an estate agent in the studio explained that holiday homes in Iraq and Afghanistan may look attractively cheap just now but are not necessarily a good investment.

The humour is quite subtle. There's no audience laughter to tell you where the jokes are - you have to spot them yourself. The great thing about the show is that it's silly enough to be funny but not so silly as to be an obvious spoof. Apparently the first show brought complaints from listeners who mistook it for a genuine phone-in.

Down the Line is classic comedy in the making and I won't be a bit surprised if, years from now, people regard it with as much reverence as Round the Horne and Hancock's Half Hour.

Revied of Down The Line from The Guardian.

The next day I listened to an episode of "Count Arthus Strongs Rafio Show" where a new mobile phone was the cause of much hilarity. You can listen to the show again here.

Spoof reminiscences of a former variety star. Count Arthur Strong is an expert in everything from the world of entertainment to the origins of the species, all false starts and nervous fumbling, poorly concealed by a delicate sheen of bravado and self-assurance.

Arthur invests in a mobile phone. Although this proves rather more of a problem than first anticipated, it leads to Arthur taking on a hospital radio show engagement. A case of mistaken identity, however, means all does not go as planned.