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.

Usability Review of a VCR with HCI Rap on YouTube

Usability Review of a VCR

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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

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.

Reading the runes for Apple

Reading the runes for Apple - Guardian - 7 Jan 2008

Apple's strength is that its customers and its employees love what it is trying to accomplish - to make computing devices beautiful and simple. People have finally realised that checkboxes don't make software, and that usability is paramount, and Apple's the only company besides Samsung to really understand this at the deepest level.

Designing Usable and Accessible Games with Interaction Design Patterns

From Gamasutra by Eelke Folmer.

Traditionally best practices concerning interface/interaction design have been captured by means of guidelines or heuristics such as Nielsen’s heuristics or the W3C web content accessibility guidelines. The purpose of guidelines is to capture design knowledge into concise small rules, which can be used to inform interface and interaction design.

Attempts to capture design knowledge have been made with regard to game interaction design. Houser & Deloach present seven principles for effective game design. Melissa Federoff has looked at how existing usability heuristics such as proposed by Nielsen apply to games and a set of 42 game heuristics is proposed. These guidelines specifically focus on usability issues and are different from attempts to describe game play such as Noah Falsteins 400 project.

Problems with heuristics

Guidelines are useful for requirements specification but if we look at their usability as a design tool some shortcomings have been identified by Welie with regard to selection, validity and applicability:

• Guidelines often suggest a general absolute validity but in fact they can often only be applied in a specific context. For example Federoff specifies “The game should have an unexpected outcome” which makes sense and works for an adventure game but does not apply to arcade games such as pong.

• It is often unclear what the problem is the guideline actually tries to solve and why. Federoff specifies “Players should be able to save games in different states” but it does not explain what usability problem it addresses and why the proposed solution would work and how it can be implemented.

• Compacting design knowledge in small concise rules has the obvious problem that you end up with a lot of rules in order to describe everything. A large number of guidelines makes it hard for a game designer to select the right rules and worse the lack of context makes certain guidelines contradict with each other. For example, “The game should have an unexpected outcome” and “there should be a clear overriding goal of the game presented early” might possibly conflict.

Design tools should first and foremost be usable. We need to be able to tell the designer exactly when to apply the solution, how the solution works and why the solution works. A requirement specified as a feature such as “closed captions” is much easier understood and implemented by a developer than the abstract guideline “Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element” it embodies. The usability and accessibility problems that we have identified are contextual; I propose to use interaction design patterns for capturing design experience, as this offers a much richer description format and hence is more useful and usable as a design tool.

World Usability Day 2007 - On YouTube

So far I have only seen one 2007 WUD video on YouTube, but it's a good one.

Whitney Quesenbery explains why Usability is importany and how it can make the world a better place.

View more Usability World Day YouTube videos.