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

| View | Upload your own

How to be a UX Team of One

| View | Upload your own

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.

It's not as easy as we pretend it is

From the BBC by Bill Thompson

By trying to sell computers as intuitive and obvious, as requiring no special skill to pick up or use, we are giving every new user a model of IT that cannot sustain their long-term use.

It is as if we told sixteen year olds that once they can drive a dodgem car at the fair they are safe to go out on the roads, because they can pick things up as they go along.

The disaster of Windows security is certainly Microsoft's fault, as for too many years they concentrated on usability at the expense of user safety.

But it is also our fault too, for not being willing to engage with our computers as complex environments that require constant attention, where our skills must be developed over time and where learning never really stops.

Sending out e-mails with everyone on the To: list is embarrassing, but it also reveals a much deeper malaise and one that we all need to address.

Yes, make computers easier to use, experiment with new interfaces like the radical approach taken on the XO model from the One Laptop Per Child project, and offer simpler and more intuitive interfaces where they are useful.

Strangely enough Apple, who focus more than most on ease of use in their advertising, also do a very good job of offering one-to-one hand-holding for new Mac users.

It is time to stop pretending that ordinary users will not need to apply themselves carefully to learn how to use these powerful systems effectively. We need to make sure that the necessary training and advice is provided when and where it is needed.

Jakob's Blog is now upto date

When I first set up Jakob Nielsen's unofficial blog last year, I wanted to populate it with all of his Alertbox entries back to 1995. Well I have finally got round to importing blog entries for over 400 items.

See more in "What if Jakob Nielsen had a blog?"

I will make sure that I continue to keep this blog upto date.

Usability of the letter e

Four years ago a spoof article stated "Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter C Unusable".

Today, the latest edition of Usability News from Wichita State University contains an article that explains why the letter e is least legible in Garamond.

Another article tells us that Courier New is neutral, whilst Calibri (the new Arial) looks professional and Curlz makes you look like a joke.

Interactive Map of Bath - Usability Testing In Action

Interactive map of Bath

Usability Testing I

Usability Testing II

Jakob 'Major' Nielsen Calls For Return To Victorian Values

Jakob 'Major' Nielsen today called on the BBC to turn away from Web2.0 hype and return to the golden age of blue links and horizontal rules.

He presented a version of the future for the BBC that harked back to the time when a bbc news page could load in under 0.5 seconds and was only permitted to include one image in each page. No extraneous navigation is allowed in the new world order and text can be any colour you want as long as it is black (apart from links).

This revolutionary "WebLite" version of the BBC News Page is expected to prompt web designers to start editing the raw "html" of their in simple text editors in an attempt to "get back to content" rather than concentrating on the gaudy baubles of ajaxian trinkets.

See Also : Why Ajax Sucks (Most Of The Time)

BBC : Web 2.0 'neglecting good design' (decadent version)

BBC : Web 2.0 'neglecting good design' (WebLite version)

Usability Quote Of The Month

From The Cranky User : Passion - 24 April 2007

Usability evangelism

Sometimes, what it takes to get an institution committed to a new course of action is simply for one person to make it a priority. If no one cares strongly about usability it's not going to happen. Few Web sites are as awful as those driven by a mandated checklist. Such formalized requirements ultimately miss the point. I once came across a usability standard that mandated JavaScript pop-ups to warn people when they were leaving the set of fully accessible pages. As a standard, it was incoherent at best: many of the people who need fully accessible pages don't have functional JavaScript, and many more might find that the implementation actually prevented them from following links!

If you care passionately about usability and accessibility, and you want your organization's Web site to be usable, you will have to convince people it's important. People who don't think about usability aren't going to suddenly start thinking about it because the boss sends out a memo. So make the case for usability. It starts with you.

John Lewis - Making Technology Simple?

I was sent a link to this John Lewis Brochure which offers me the promise of "technology made simple".

But is it?

Reading the simple instructions I am told that I can "Click on the corners of the e-brochure to turn the pages".

Can I? No I can't. If I click on any of the corners other than the one in the bottom right I zoom in on the brochure rather than turn the page.

The next bullet point tells me that I can "Click on any product to see full details and to make a purchase".

Can I? No I can't. If I click on any of the products on this page I zoom in on the brochure rather than see details of the product.

So, the promise to provide "technology made simple" isn't even kept on the cover. Why didn't John Lewis spend a little bit of time usability testing this e-brochure mort thoroughly.

This is the sort of problem that occurs when you customise a standard product but forget to check if your specific customisations affect the user experience in a negative way.

Perhaps John Lewis have just taken their eye off the usability ball:

"Usability testing before launch allowed us to make sure our new site was fast, friendly and easy to use. Usability by Design helped ensure that customers can quickly find the products they want and purchase them easily, helping the new John Lewis site maintain the high quality that
customers expect from John Lewis."
John Phipps, Vice President Commercial, John Lewis

Quote taken from Usability By Design

PS. It looks like J60 might be "doing usability" for John Lewis.

An Agile Presentation in the form of a tribute to John Lennon

I have entered this Presentation into SlideShare's Worlds Best Presentation Competition.

An Agile Presentation in the form of a tribute to John Lennon.

Real Reality TV

Using Documentary-Style Video to Place Real People at the Center of the Design Process

In a user-centered design research setting, many hours of videotape are reduced to a few key minutes in the interest of saving colleagues' time, capturing short attention spans, and communicating that which is most compelling, insightful, and germane. Because of this brevity, video ethnographers are sometimes asked by colleagues, "How do we know what really happened when we only see footage after it has been edited?" It is a legitimate question. How does a fellow researcher know whether the video being presented accurately reflects reality? How does he or she know how to "read" the images? When does video need to be framed and contextualized for the viewer? Why can or can't it stand on its own? How does the specific use of video for ethnography and user-centered design research help determine how it should be viewed and by whom? Should different audiences be given different levels of contextualization and complexity? What is appropriate to present in an active, workshop setting, and what works in a relatively passive presentation?

Intel Technology Journal Feb 2007 by Susan Faulkner

Probably the most honest 404 Page in the world

The best thing about this year's April Fool from Google was their 404 error page.

I have also updated Simply Google with the new TiSP site.

The BBC have had these images running on their homepage today:

Here is some advice from the BBC on what makes a great April Fool.

A really good gag needs to be both ridiculous and believable, say those who have studied the craft. It's a hard trick to pull off and most pranksters end up with jokes that are ridiculous, but not at all believable, says Alex Boese, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes in San Diego, California.

"The really good ones succeed at making us believe something that we recognise, in hindsight, we really shouldn't have believed because it's completely preposterous," he says.

"In a humorous way they teach us something about the limits of our own knowledge. They show us how unfamiliar many of the things around us - that we take for granted - are."

The question has employed some of the world's finest brains. The eminent wartime scientist Reginald Jones, who headed the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence at the Air Ministry during World War II, researched the perfect April Fool's gag. He came up with the equation: induction followed by incongruity.

Car usability and safety come before aesthetics

Bad, better and best?

"The position of lights on the car should be guided by safety considerations - not aesthetics" Andrew Bayliss

Modern car indicators could be compromising drivers' safety, a study by the University of Wales, Bangor, has claimed.

Many new designs position indicators within car headlamps - rather than a separate flashing light to the side.

But Bangor researcher Dr Andrew Bayliss said tests showed people took longer to react to the new-style lights.

BBC News - 28 March 2007

News Article | Research Paper | Andrew Bayliss

Perhaps Andrew could include this alternative design for a car indicator by John Wood.in his next study.

"This invention relates to a direction indicator for motor-cars, that is to say an appliance for use by the driver in signalling his intention to turn the vehicle and refers to that type of appliance wherein a direction-pointing device, such for instance as a representation of a human hand, is mounted upon a vertical axis to be turnable by the driver to cause such direction-pointing device to project either forwardly or laterally according to the direction it is the intention of the driver to proceed." - Patent 1664148

The Ministry of Transpoort in the UK have also put a lot of though into road safety over the years and In 1919, when drivers commonly used hand signals to indicate they were turning, the Ministry of Transport was keen to find a basic alternative.

One submitted plan proposed attaching a clumsy contraption to the side of the car, depicting an image of a hand with one finger pointing the way.

News Article

An Interview with Ralph Baer, the Father of Video Games

GS: Do you think real ping pong is more fun than your video game version?

RB: Well, it's different fun, but it's a lot of fun. And to think about ping pong, one more digression. One of the complaints that his highness Nolan Bushnell had was "Well, you didn't have any scoring on screen." To which I respond: well, it's kinda funny, you know. We've been playing real ping pong for the last hundred years, right? And tennis. And guess how you score tennis and ping pong? You call out the score, you know, nice and loud, right? Nobody needed any scores on the screen.

That was a real iffy addition. I had no way of doing it with the technology available to us for a price in 1966-67. But it was not necessary to play an interesting tennis game. You just call it out -- who needs scoring?

What was stupid on our part -- and I couldn't believe in retrospect -- was that we didn't have any sound. Yeah, that was the big attraction, addition, that made it much more lively a game that Alan Alcorn and Bushnell came up with, adding a "pong" sound when you hit the ball. Why we didn't think of that, in retrospect? I can't believe we didn't do that. Part of it was that I wasn't really a game person, ever. It only grew as I worked with the stuff.

Extract from interview with Ralph Baer on Gamasutra - 23 March 2007

Familiarity breeds what?

By Pete Seebach (The Cranky User) February 2007 - Who Needs a Virtual Keyboard?

Usability people love to harp on the value of using familiar interfaces to help users adapt to new products. While good in theory, in practice this approach sometimes does little more than breathe new life into bad ideas. Just because I've seen something before does not mean I want to see it again -- ever!

QuickTime's thumb-wheel interface to control volume, for instance, was abysmal, not because I couldn't figure out how to use it, but because using it was awkward and inconvenient. Thumb wheels are great for objects that you adjust with your hands, but they're horrible as a GUI element. QuickTime has since lost that particular element, to Apple Inc.'s credit.

Another example is the virtual keyboard. Used for input, these elements are consistently hated. The entire point of a keyboard is that you type on it. A virtual keyboard that requires you to type with a mouse is a poor substitute. Even the most untrained typist can type with more than one finger, and real fingers are much easier to aim than mice.

Eyetracking and Gender

This picture says it all.

Conyne recommends designers avoid the generic pictures that are often used just for the sake of having a picture.

"For example," she said, "if an article is about a signature meal at a restaurant, say a tuna dish, display a scrumptious-looking picture of the plate of food. Don't show a generic picture of a spoon and fork, as many sites do."

When photos do contain people related to the task at hand, or the content users are exploring, they do get fixations. However, gender makes a distinct difference on what parts of the photo are stared at the longest. Take a look at the hotspot below.

Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.

From Online Journalism Review

The UXerati Are Born

Lou Rosenfeld recently launched the UX Zeitgeist.

I like to think of it the next generation of the Userati list that I maintained for a few years.

I found that the most interesting thing about maintaing the userati list was the number of intersting people I came across who I had never investigated before. It does make you feel a bit like a stalker, but it is one of the most rewarding experiments from Mac Labs that I have ever worked on.

Congratulations Lou.

Rediscovering AIGA

Browsing the AIGA web site used to be a bit like whale watching. You could spend hours gazing at a choppy surface and if you were very lucky you might catch a glimpse of a beatiful fluke as it broke the surface and then disappeared just as quickly.

I am excited to see that Happy Cog has re-designed the AIGA site.

Months of intense collaboration later, Happy Cog’s redesign of AIGA has launched. We junked the old structure, flattened the hierarchy, and surfaced the content. We gave the site’s years of brilliant writing by the likes of Ellen Lupton and Steven Heller an appropriately readable home—one that demonstrates what web typography can achieve.

And to make the site as inspirational as it is educational, we introduced a second narrative to the user experience: dynamically chosen selections from AIGA’s design archives visually intrude at the top of every page, inviting designers to dive into the archives whenever they seek refreshment.

Here is an extract from some old content I am busy discovering:

Noah's Archives - February 2004 by Ralph Caplan

Whoever it comes from, what appears online tends to stay around. So does print, but not as efficiently. Electronic storage saves space and electronic retrieval saves time. When rummaging through my mind won’t yield the information I need, I used to look in books. But even if I have the right book, it is easier to ask Google than to find it on the shelf. Easier, but faintly troubling. With print, the words are intact, even if I can’t find them. But where are these words when I’m not looking at them? They are in the computer’s memory, which is in every respect superior to my own, and getting suspiciously bigger and better all the time.

In a radio broadcast Andrei Codrescu speculated on where all the additional memory is coming from. I’m not sure he named the suspects, but I will. From the fact that computer memory is increasing in direct proportion to the rate at which human memory is decreasing, Codrescu deduced a conspiracy between IBM and Greyhound to rob unwitting passengers of 16 megabytes of RAM with each revolution of a bus’s wheels.

I have avoided buses ever since I heard that, but my own memory is still being ripped off daily. Maybe there is a similar cabal made up of Intel and Honda dealers.

The web accelerates the production of ephemera, then uses its prodigious memory to archive it; so the name of this column is not a wholly gratuitous pun. While I was writing it, my grandson was born. His name is Noah. However skillful he may become in carpentry and navigation, I doubt that Anyone will ever command him to build an ark. Still, in the world he will grow up in, online and off, could an archive be as effective?

Bristol Usability Group - Show me your tools

The next Bristol Usability Group meeting will take place on the 15th February 13th February.

Usability practitioner tools, methods and techniques: what are people using? Let's share and discuss, feel free to bring along your favourite tool and give us a walk through (Stuart, I think you volunteered to bring a couple!).

I won't be able to make this meeting, but my favourite tools are post-it notes, index cards and mind mapping software.

Agile and Usability - Have you got Usagility?

The slides from a presentation I gave at the Bristol Usability Group.

There's a lot of discussion behind these slides. So ask me about Usagility, if you get a chance.

I think that Usagility may be part of the beginning of an answer to Donna's question:

OK/Cancel - Missing in action?

Calling Tom and Kevin, are you still there?

I have been waiting for the first 2007 instalment of OK/Cancel, but it's now February and nothing has appeared yet.

If this is the final OK/Cancel then I think that the first and last strips are appropriate book ends for the "usability practioners experience".

It starts with dismissiveness, mis-understanding and patronising comments.

19 Sep 2003 - An Introduction

31 Dec 2006 - Year end awards

and ends with acceptance and recognition of the importance of design.

If this is the end, the I would like to express my heart felt thanks to Tom and Kevin for publishing OK/Cancel over the past four years. You have managed to give HCI a human face. Thank You.

A Prgamatic Approach to Web Accessibility

Peter Kranz has put together a google co-op search for accessibility.

Discount or Disservice? Cheap and Nasty Usability

The latest article from Jakob Nielsen "Fast, Cheap, and Good: Yes, You Can Have It All" is an admission that usability in the enterprise has failed. In this alertbox article Jakob says that "For everyday design projects, discount usability methods are the best." What is an "everday design project". Jakob used to talk about Discount Usability as a stepping stone to more "deluxe" methods, but now he seems to think that dimestore usability is the best that we can aspire to.

Here is what Jakob was saying about Discount Usability twelve years ago:

Discount or Disservice? Discount Usability Analysis--Evaluation at a bargain price or simply damaged merchandise?

This paper was originally presented at CHI'95. What appears below is an extract from the full paper.

ABSTRACT
The panel will focus on Jakob Nielsen’s Discount Usability approach and guidelines. Nielsen has single handily restored guidelines to CHI. After being discredited because of the sheer impracticality of using 1000+ guidelines, Nielsen has been working hard to convince practitioners that all they need to know about usability can be summarized in 10 guidelines. This may be a real disservice. While using 10 guidelines may be better than using none, do people who have learned Nielsen’s 10 think that they now know all they need to know about usability? The panel proposes a wide-ranging, public discussion of these issues.

Jacob Nielsen, SunSoft
A Bird ia Hand. As the saying goes, two birds in the bush will not provide you with much for dinner. Similarly, perfectly polished usability techniques will not improve your interface much unless they are in fact applied in your project.

Discount usability engineering aims at placing a bird in your hand by providing methods that are so easy and cheap to use that people will in fact use them on almost every project. The methods have acknowledged weaknesses and are not guaranteed to give perfect answers every time. However, they do provide reasonable answers most of the time, and these reasonable answers are much better than the guesswork that would result if designs were shipped with zero usability involvement. Consider the issue of statistical significance. If a result has a p-value of .2, it means that there is 20% probability that it does not hold. However, in the remaining 80% of the cases, the result would be correct, so acting on it would be much better than the 50% chance of success that would follow from a random decision (assuming a dichotomous choice).

As organizations reach progressively higher levels of usability maturity, they will start using a larger number of “deluxe” usability methods. For example, many companies eventually build a usability laboratory, and a small number of companies even start doing format modeling of critical dialogues. Discount usability engineering plays two roles in the path toward higher usability maturity: (1) it smoothes the way by lowering the threshold of getting started, and (2) it can be used on fast-paced or low-budget projects even in organizations that use a more careful approach for their high-priority projects. For example, I recently had to perform four usability evaluations of a World-Wide Web interface within a single week, and some of the last icon iterations were tested with an N of 1. Still, that was better than an N of O (the alternative given the deadline to ship the design).

Wayne D. Gray, George Mason University
Discount Usability appears to be a hodgepodge of techniques and guidelines whose exact interpretation may vary greatly from practitioner to practitioner. While in the hands of the master the interpretation and use of the guidelines is influenced by years of study and thought on HCI issues, the average practitioner does not have such an extensive background. Herein lies the difficulty. That an inspired designer, such as Nielsen, can use the guidelines to produce a superior interface is not at issue. What is at issue is how these guidelines are used by people who have not made a career of studying interface design. While Discount Usability may produce “bargain” interfaces, we should be careful that we do not simply get what we paid for. The leading alternatives to Discount Usability (including Claims Analysis, GOMS, TAG, Cognitive Walkthroughs, and Participatory Design) all place a heavy emphasis on the careful analysis of the flow of information between people and computers (various of these approaches place varying emphases on the social and organizational dynamics of computer use as well). While such alternatives are by no means “discount” approaches all promise substantial time savings over the traditional usability lab approach. Note that advocates of such methodologies seem to believe that it is the application of the method and not its learning that takes the most time. (N.B, all such techniques have been the subject of well-received, 1 day, CHI tutorials.) The time required to apply these techniques is almost totally a function of the amount, degree, and level of analysis required to understand how the human and the computer must interact to perform the task. Shortcutting the time required to do these analyses may make interface design faster but the result is no bargain.

In his most recent article he also had this to say about Intranets :

Sadly, intranet teams can't conduct competitive studies. Instead, read the Intranet Design Annual each year to hold your own intranet up against ten award-winning designs.

Or you could join the Intranet Benchmarking Forum where you can see how your intranet compares with other peoples offerings:

The IBF was formed because those running intranets felt isolated in their roles and faced daunting strategic and day to day management challenges. They wanted to be part of a community where they could gauge the effectiveness of their intranets, learn from best practice and swap ideas. The IBF began as an "intranet club" for intranet managers to meet with those in similar roles and share their experiences. But instead of simply setting up a forum for informal discussion, we developed an intranet audit methodology that could be applied to each member’s site. This meant discussions were based on clear standards and hard facts.

I wonder why Jakob didn't mention this option?

If even Jakob is lowering his expectations then perhaps it's time for all of us to give up on usability completely.

The ntl:Telewest Simplicity Rip-Off

Earlier this year my cable provider "Telewest" merged with "NTL".

This is what they told us about the changes to come:

Surely my services are going to change?
Today it's business as usual and there's no change to your services, contracts, prices or customer service contacts as a result of the completion of the merger. However, we will go through a process of integrating the businesses, based on taking forward the best of both. As decisions are made and changes take place, we will ensure that information is communicated to you as early as is possible.

What sort of changes might take place?
Our aim is to offer a consistent service to all cable customers - taking the best of both companies - and therefore some changes to the services offered today may take place. It's too early to be specific. New technology and innovation may also lead to new services.

It sounded great. I was going to get the best of the NTL offerings and NTL customers were going to get the best of the Telewest offerings.

This morning I received this leaflet in the post:

It goes onto say:

Since Telewest and ntl joined forces, one of the first things we’ve done is make sure our prices offer the same great value to everyone. We’ve tried to make everything clear and simple for you.

Now I love the idea of simplicity, and I was anxious to find out how my life was going to be made simpler.

They had changed the name of my TV package from "Supreme" to "TV Size: XL". Not much problem with that, although it does make me sound like I have a TV obestity problem.

I then looked at the price changes and saw that my renamed TV package was being simplified from £17.50 a month to £20.50 a month. That means that I will be paying 17% more each month to watch the same TV I am watching now.

I wondered if NTL customers were already paying this amount and I just happened to be getting the raw deal in the "simplifying" process.

After looking at the equivalent NTL leaflet I saw that the NTL package that was called "Family" had also been renamed to "TV Size: XL". They are currently paying £19.50 a month for their package and they will soon be paying the simplified £20.50 as well.

Now forgive me for being a bit stupid. But there is only one option available that would take "the best of both companies" foward. Telewest customers continue to pay £17.50 a month and NTL customers have their charges reduced from £19.50 to £17.50.

The next worst option would be to charge NTL customers the same £19.50 a month and increase the Telewest charges from £17.50 to £19.50 a month.

The absolute worst option would be to charge NTL customers £1 a month more and charge Telewest customers £3 a month more.

That's not simplification. It's a bloody rip-off.

If you look at some of the presentations that they have been making resently, you can see how they have already "saved" over £150 million pounds this year by sacking staff:

and it is clear that the current "alignment of products" is just the start of the "Virgin Media" rebranding process that I am going to have to pay for.

It's very interesting to listen to the audio presentation while looking at the slides and you can hear how they are "getting rid" of the NTL customers who aren't paying enough (slide 3).

I wonder why they didn't put the presentation link in their leaflet? 

How Much Exercise Does a Cat Need?

I have been perusing the US Patents library by searching on the new Google Patent Search.

I have got two cats and I never realised how cruel I was being to them because of my ignorance of their exercise requirements.

US Patent 5443036 Method of exercising a cat

A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.

I have always used a piece of string or wool and got exactly the same effect.

Why don't you play my "Find The Stupid Patent Game" (pat pending) over this holiday period.

When you get bored of that you might like to look at the 79 Usability Patents by Jakob Nielsen that I have put together on my unofficial Jakob Nielsen Blog.

I have also updated my "Simply Google" page with the new patent search as well.

Sugar Usability

Read this:

OLPC places an emphasis on discoverability and usability due to our target audience. Usability has everything to do with the actual behavior of the activities, the layout of the buttons and tools, and the feedback that the interface provides to the user through interaction. Ultimately, the design decisions that make your activities usable will depend greatly on the type of activity you are developing, and it will be up to you to consider carefully the kinds of interactions users will expect when presented with it. As a general rule, if the interface provided does what the child expects it to, you are off to a good start. However, since it is quite difficult to know what she will expect—and in practice not all children will expect the same things—there is no substitute for user testing.

Watch this:

Install this:

Bristol Usability Group

Visit the Bristol Usability Group wiki for more information.

Why people come to BUG:
Networking and meeting people with similar interests; discuss different usability methods and approaches; keep abreast of what is going on in the field; see what projects others work on and what practices they use; learn and share experiences...

Previous Meetings:
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 (World Usability Day) The topic was: Making masks for participatory requirements gathering, by Dave Ellender, cxpartners.

Vista no go zone

I just tried the Vista Upgrade Advisor on my two year old Dell Dimension XPS and got this result:

Not looking too good.

Information Architecture 3.0

Peter Morville:

Sadly, both role and community are under attack, and in today’s political economy, where people can select their sources and choose their news, the truth should never misunderestimate the power of invention.

If it were only a few silly Death of IA posts, there’d be no response required. But the current campaign, led by senior practitioners of our sister discipline - interaction design - is worth mention.

Now, as I noted in a blog post, I’ve been digging deeper into interaction design lately, and unfortunately, I keep finding information architecture. I joined IxDA just in time for a celebration of the total absence of information architects from Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge. I opened About Face 2.0 by Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann, only to find them slamming information architecture in the book’s introduction:

When corporate interest in the Web had reached its peak around 2000, a discipline called information architecture (IA) seemed like it might eventually embody the kind of design discussed here. But, even as the financial prospects of the Web have waned, IA has largely retained its narrow, Web-centric view of organizing and navigating content in pages. With the apparent decline of the new economy, the fortunes of the IA community have similarly diminished.

I find it rather astonishing that these interaction design leaders dedicate such energy (and in their book's introduction, no less) to denigrating information architecture as a community and discipline.

And, if I were feeling snarky, I might argue this is a manifestation of the semantic envy of designers who would be architects of which Tog wrote or that we’re witnessing a classic case of the younger sister competing for resources and attention. After all, there’s a reason why "information architecture" is five times more valuable than "interaction design" in the eyes of Google AdWords.

Paper beats pixels

Need to get from A to B? Don't bother switching on that fancy piece of kit on your dashboard. The consumer magazine Computing Which? has confirmed what thousands of frustrated motorists already know from bitter experience: that the best source of directions is not an expensive satellite navigation system, but a map.

In a trial that will delight Luddites and the long-suffering partners of gadget enthusiasts, the magazine tested four route-finding aids to determine the best way to reach a particular destination. Three hi-tech systems, including a £220 satnav box, a Microsoft software package and the government's own direction-finding website, were tested alongside the more old-fashioned method. The most effective? A copy of the AA's Great Britain Road Atlas, priced £8 from most petrol stations.

Guardian Unlimited

Usability Search

This is my first attempt at a custom google search for Usability.

At the moment it only include half a dozen sites, but I shall be adding a lot more over the next few days.

SlideShare Usability Review 1 : Sign Up

Keith Instone receives UPA award

Keith is one of the unsing heroes of the usability world.

Congratulations.

His Usable Web site was the inspirations for Usability Views.

The Real Microsoft Usability Lab?

"Micromanagement, though not pervasive, is nevertheless evident.  Senior vice presidents sometimes review UI designs of individual features, a nod to Steve Jobs that would in better days have betokened a true honor but for its randomizing effects.  Give me a cathedral, give me a bazaar -- really, either would be great.  Just not this middle world in which some decisions are made freely while others are made by edict, with no apparent logic separating each from the other but the seeming curiosity of someone in charge."

Broken Windows Theory

"This organisational system is only being honest about what really happens in most successful projects.
Projects that succeed always have a character with a vision of what they want, and the determination to make it happen. This is often the reason why very small teams of 1 or 2 people can be very productive and very successful, but there is no reason why large teams cannot achieve the same results.

Very often functionality is implemented in a system just because someone thought that it seemed like a 'cool' idea, and no-one has the authority to just say no. This is how we end up with software products where 99% of all users only use 5% of the functionality."

The Design Dictator

Usability Consultant / Information Architect Job in Bath, UK

Anyone fancy a usability/ia job in my neck of the woods?

Company AdLib
Location Bath
Salary Circa £35,000

"If you have an exceptional grasp on best practise online, and fancy being part of an outfit which takes user-centred design and accessibility seriously, this one's for you.

We're after an expert in user experience / information architecture to join a leading digital agency in the South West.  You'll play a pivotal role in the online delivery team and be a client facing addition working closely with designers, developers, Project and Account Managers.

As you'll be presenting solutions to clients, we'll need you to have an understanding of the underlying marketing strategy behind a campaign, and will give you exposure to a wide range of blue chip brands across varying markets.

As an expert in your field, key responsibilities will include developing user profiles and defining user journeys; creating intuitive site architectures and wireframes.  You'll act as the guardian of all accessibility guidelines for the agency and review all key IA documentation before it goes out.

We're looking for genuinely passionate online people here.  You should balance creative and technical understanding and know the constraints and possibilities of digital media.

These roles are really rare so if you think you have what it takes, form an orderly queue."

http://www.justadlib.co.uk/jobs/vacancy_details.php?vacancy_id=576

Agile Usability from Scott Ambler

Here is an extract from an article written by Scott Ambler about Agile Usabiity:

Agile Usability: User Experience Activities on Agile Development Projects

I found this article when Scott left a comment on my earlier post about Agile Usability.

4. Addressing a Few Misconceptions

To help promote effective collaboration between the two communities we need to clear up a few misconceptions that each community may have with the other.  There are several that UEX practitioners may have about the agile community:

• Agilists don’t model.  The actual fact is that agile practitioners do in fact model, it’s just that they discourage extensive up-front design work  in favor of more agile approaches to modeling. 
• Agilists are continually deploying software into production.  Although some teams do this, it’s not the norm.  What is common is to deliver working software on a regular basis, perhaps every few weeks, into an internal environment for system and user testing.  Deployment into production may occur every six-to-twelve months, if not longer, based on need and the ability of our end users to accept new releases. 
• XP is the only game in town.  This is a serious misunderstanding because UEX practitioners who believe this miss agile methods such as Scrum, Agile Modeling, Agile MSF, and DSDM which are arguably more attuned to their philosophies.
• There is no role for UEX practitioners.  Many agile methods forgo the concept of specific roles in favor of more generic roles such as developer/programming, coach/leader, and customer/stakeholder. 
• Agilists aren’t specialists. This is partly true because agilists prefer to be “eneralizing specialists.
• User interfaces shouldn’t be refactored.  The reality is that UI refactoring results in the slow, but safe evolution of the UI, thereby improving its design.  Yes, the UI changes, hopefully for the better, but the only people affected by the changes on a continual basis are those actively involved in user testing.   And when you stop to think about it, shouldn’t developers act on the findings of usability testing efforts and thereby improve the UI? 

The agile community equally suffers from debilitating misperceptions about the UEX community:

• All you need is a good set of UI guidelines.  That’s a good start, but there is a fair bit more to UEX than creating consistent UIs.
• Working closely with stakeholders is good enough. That’s also a good start, but Jokela and Abrahamsson (2004) found that even a close and frequent co-operation between developers and stakeholders does not ensure good usability at all. 
• UEX is just about UI design.  UI design is clearly a part of UEX, but so is understanding how your users will work with your system and what their goals for using the system are so that you can build something that is usable by them.  This requires significant modeling and collaboration skills to accomplish.
• UEX relies on comprehensive up-front modeling.  Although some people (Cooper 2004) in the UEX community want you to believe that, many others believe different.

Agile Usability: User Experience Activities on Agile Development Projects by Scott Ambler

Tesco.com Horrors on R4

It's not very often you turn on the radio while you are doing the washing up and hear a company being berated for not doing a good enough job on accessibility, but this week I was pleasently surprised to hear Tesco and the RNIB having a bit of a ding-dong. You can read an extract from the full transcript below:

Contributors
Julie Howell (Digital Development Manager, RNIB)
Nick Lansley (IT Manager, Tesco.com)
Tom Walker (Tesco Customer)

Walker
I would say this site technically is probably accessible, it probably does meet most of the triple A compliance requirement. What they've not done and what they've forgotten to do is do basic usability testing. That wasn't the only problem I found. I also found, for instance, if you inadvertently hit the return key it takes you to a place you don't want to be, so then if you use alt left arrow to go back you get timed out. Speaking to other visually impaired people over the weekend there were also issues when you go to check out. What strikes me Gary here, more than anything else, is it just hasn't been properly user tested.

O'Donoghue
With me in the studio is Julie Howell, who's from the RNIB and helped Tesco with their site, as is Nick Lansley, who's the IT manager for Tesco. Julie, what advice were you giving Tesco on this redesign?

Howell
I must start by saying Tom I'm horrified by the experience that you're having there, just atrocious and you sound incredibly patient.

O'Donoghue
And hungry.

Howell
And hungry and a week and a half of messing about is not what you should have to go through when you're just trying to get your food and other supplies from Tesco. I can tell you a little bit about the way that RNIB works with Tesco. The changes that you're experiencing are absolutely not changes that are as a consequence of RNIB's advice to Tesco, we'd like to make that completely clear to start with. What we have done with Tesco, we audited the site that they already had, we suggested some changes to them and we then expected the company to come back to us with their revised design that indeed we would do some usability testing on. It sounds like Tesco have rushed ahead far too quickly and have inflicted upon existing customers a site that some people, like yourself, are finding very, very difficult to use. It's not your job Tom to be messing about on the site, Tesco employ people to do that.

O'Donoghue
Okay Nick Lansley, it sounds like you haven't tested it very much.

Lansley
I too am a little bit distressed by the experience you've been having. Certainly Tom trying to do a week and a half to do your ordering is certainly not what we wanted to do with the new Tesco access service. We have been building and testing it for the last year and we've been working with a few hundred Beta Test customers over the last few months to try and make sure that we cover all accessibility and important usability standpoints. The service actually launched in March and we actually ran the old access and the new access sites side by side for three months, letting people know on the old access site that there was a three month countdown started and please could you give us feedback if you had any problems. And lots of people did and we made three or four changes to the service to improve it. But the situation at the end of May was that we were - actually quite bizarrely as far as I'm concerned - were actually taking four times as many orders through the new access service as we were the old and we certainly hadn't mentioned this to sighted customers, it's only been available as a message on the old access site.

O'Donoghue
Julie, that's got to be a sign that they're doing something right, if four times as many people are going through it.

Howell
They're clearly doing something right for some people some of the time, which is the problem isn't it. I mean it sounds like Tom is a very experienced access technology user and good for you Tom but there are a great many people who are blind and partially sighted using the computer - using the internet - who don't know a great deal about the technology and nor should they have to. And if you're spending a week and a half trying to get to grips with the system what on earth is it like for those people?

O'Donoghue
But isn't the fact though that actually for blind people looking at a web page isn't an intuitive experience and essentially you have to learn sites don't you?

Howell
Why shouldn't it be an intuitive experience though is my question?

O'Donoghue
Because you can't see the whole image in one go, for a sighted person it's a different experience, doesn't there have to be a certain amount of learning for blind people when they use a website?

Howell
There's a certain amount of learning but it shouldn't be an insurmountable task of the type that Tom describes, that's not necessary.

O'Donoghue
What changes do you think they need to make now?

Howell
I would like Tesco to stop making changes to the site on a day by day or week by week basis, I would much rather Tesco slowed down, took stock, worked on a redesign and had an agency, such as RNIB, or any other agency that can provide specialist advice in this area to have a look at it as a whole and to feed back changes, rather than what appears to be happening right now, which is Tesco making changes in response to customer feedback without looking at the whole picture.

O'Donoghue
How far off are they from making an accessible site?

Howell
I don't know, I'm just hearing with horror the experience that Tom is having. We would love to have an opportunity to say stop, let us see what you're doing now.

Words Matter

Words matter. Psychologists depersonalize the people they study by calling them “subjects.” We depersonalize the people we study by calling them “users.” Both terms are derogatory. They take us away from our primary mission: to help people. Power to the people, I say, to repurpose an old phrase. People. Human Beings. That’s what our discipline is really about.

Don Norman - Words Matter

Google Connections

Google Trends Connections for usability, information architecture, user experience, interaction design

I have also added this search to Simply Google.

I'm on a Vlog

Simply Google got a mention on the CommandN Vlog last week.

Here are Amber and Mike talking about goo-home.com where they encourage people to set it as their homepage.

And here is the page itself.

CommandN got a mention in Wired this month in their Guide to the Online Video Explosion.

BBC - World Wide Blunderland

[UPDATE 1 May 2005 19:45]

Within an hour of posting this item both of these 404 errors were fixed. Was it just a co-incidence or were the fixes triggered by someone who had read this post?

About three hours ago (5.12pm) I added this item to delicious.
At 6.21pm this post was read by a delicious user who subscribes to items tagged with BBC.
When I checked at 7.10pm the homepage 404 had been fixed and when I checked the News Player 10 minutes ago it had been fixed as well.

The delicious user mentioned also happens to have a blog. Jem Stone works at the BBC and is also involved in the reboot competition.

So, if it was Jem who fixed these 404's. Thanks a lot. It proves that there are a lot of hard working, passionate people behind bbc.co.uk who are willing to put in the effort to make bbc.co.uk something special.

It also shows that the Cluetrain was spot on.

[ORIGINAL POST]

Now don't get me wrong, I love the BBC and think of them as a world leader when it comes to the online experience, but they really need to stop making basic mistakes like this.

What do you do when you get a 404 error while you are surfing the net?

Like 99.99% of all users you will just shrug your shoulders, lose a little bit of respect for the site you are viewing and move on. If someone actually takes the time to report your fault to you then you should fix the problem as quickly as possible and say thank you.

Two days ago I found a broken link at the bottom of the bbc.co.uk homepage. The section on the right is advertising a site about "The Impressionists", which is probably supposed to tie-in with the 3 part factual drama that started on BBC ONE last night.

When you click on the link you see this 404 error page.

It's clear that someone didn't overwrite the last link properly and instead of using /arts/multimedia/impressionism/ they used /ouch/arts/multimedia/impressionism/ instead.

The BBC should not be making these basic mistakes on it's homepage. It should be using a proper content management system that actually checks all links before it puts them live rather than relying on the cut and paste skills of an employee who is probably more worried about their pension rather than the position of their cursor.

I used the contact form on the bbc.co.uk site and gave detailed instructions on which 5 characters would need to be deleted to fix the problem. I did get a standard reply to my e-mail yesterday but the link is still broken three days after being reported.

I have noticed that the quality of the links on bbc.co.uk appears to be getting quite bad lately. Here is an example of another broken link that should never have been published.

You can use the BBC News Player to watch news items on demand. You also have four size options at the bottom of the player that can be selected at any time.

If you choose the NORMAL (VIDEO & TEXT) option you get the following error page.

Instead of putting so much effort into re-branding MyBBCPlayer as iPlayer, and wondering what the world might be like in 2012, Mark Thompson should pay more attention to the basics of getting the quality right on bbc.co.uk.

Here are a few suggestions for the BBC Webmasters that might be useful:

1. Ensure that you have the same custom 404 error handler on each of your servers. The user doesn't care if Ouch is on a different server from News.
2. Either build a content management system that is fool proof or make sure that you test your content before it goes live.
3. Take pride in your content. Every tag, angle bracket and paragraph. If a mistake gets published then fix it as soon as you possibly can and treat it as an opportunity to improve your publishing processes rather than sweeping it under the carpet.
4. Improve how you do things every day. Your sites are constantly changing. So Should you.
5. Don't spend so much time thinking about the future. Get on and create it by Getting Real and Being Simple.

"Getting Simple" is the Dogme of Homepage Design

"Getting Simple" is about designing a simple homepage that gives a deeper view into the content of a site than a traditional homepage design. A usable homepage doesn't have to be graphically rich or colourful. If you work with a very limited palette of html tools then it helps the designer to put a lot of thought into each word and the important whitespace around the words. You could think of "Getting Simple" as the Dogme of homepage design.

I have entered Simply BBC in the Reboot (or is it rebot?) competition.

My Google Homepage hits the headlines

Simply Google is now at number 1 in the del.icio.us popular list.

Simply Google - What if Google only had one homepage?

There has been a lot of discussion about Google's so called simplicity and the talk of homepage googlization.

I decided to design a new Google homepage that inlcuded links to all of the different searches, sites and blogs.

I call it Simply Google and it can be found at goo-home.com.

I think that it is a lot simpler than the corresponding google offering. What do you think?

Agile Usability

Agile Software Development has the effect of constraining the amount of design detail discussed to what is critical to plan the current release or iteration, or to design the current feature being built.  Agile development relies on verbal communication and tacit knowledge built inside the development team.  For UCD/usability techniques to be best applied they must be changed to be more collaborative – to improve increases in tacit knowledge inside the team; they must be changed to limit the amount of detail they produce to be appropriate to the needs of the current work ongoing in the agile development lifecycle.

Challenges and Strategies for Using User-Centered Design and Usability Techniques in Agile Development - Jeff Patton - June 2005

Usability professionals cannot sit on the sidelines and wait for the suits and the geeks to fight it out. They must get involved and ensure that the methodology adopted allows for User Centered Design practices to flourish and give the software development process the human aspect that is needed to create great software.

You cannot sit back and complain that the development process doesn't allow usability testing results to be used to improve the software because the geeks say it's too late to change the design.

The Software Engineering War : What does it mean for Usabilty? - Chris McEvoy - February 2006

The more I examine this issue, the more I think that it is we, the HCI community, who are wrong. This includes me, for I have long championed the “study first, design second” approach. Well, I now suggest that for many projects the order is design, then study.

Let’s face it: once a project is announced, it is too late to study what it should be – that’s what the announcement was about. If you want to do creative study, you have to do it before the launching of the project. You have to be on the team that decides what projects to do in the first place – which means you have to be part of the management team. (HCI bug one: not enough HCIers are executives.)

Most projects are enhancements of already existing projects. Why do we have to start studying the users all over again? Haven’t we already learned a lot about them? Shouldn’t we be studying them all throughout the adoption period? Once a project starts, it is too late. Think about it.

But note too this contradiction: All of us usability theorists have long argued for iterative design, trying to get rid of the lengthy, inflexible linear project schedules that stymie flexibility and change, that slows up projects. Instead, we have championed iterative design, with frequent, rapid prototyping and frequent, rapid test.

But wait a minute, our continual plea for up-front user studies, field observations, and the discovery of true user needs are a step backwards: they are a linear, inflexible process inserted prior to the design and coding stages. We are advocating a waterfall method for us, even as we deny it for others. Yes, folks. By saying we need time to do field studies, observations, rapid paper prototypes and the like, we are contradicting the very methods that we claim to be promoting.

The programming community has long struggled with similar issues. They too are trying to eliminate the lengthy, inflexible linear project schedules that slow up projects. They are experimenting with a variety of new methods, for example Agile, XP (Extreme Programming), and other rapid, iterative programming methods. Hurrah for them.

The linear project procedures (also called “waterfall methods”), with lengthy setting of objectives, followed by design, coding and then test, is dead. Thank goodness. The new programming styles practice iterative design, and promulgate multi-disciplinary teams: everything we should be striving for. Now it is time for the UI community to follow their lead – to do what we ourselves have been preaching.

Why doing user observations first is wrong - Don Norman - April 2006

Don Norman on Web 2.0

Finally, we are moving from static pages to dynamic displays, where the movement is a major part of the charm.

I’d like to see this studied through controlled experiments with valid behavioral and subjective measures. Meanwhile, while waiting for the science to reveal the secrets, there is a mad rush of developers, all anxious to explore Rich Internet technologies, all anxious to add movement and overlays to their pages. We’ve seen this type of over enthusiasm before, so be prepared to go through a phase where everything shimmers, where panels shrink and expand, where you will never know whether to left click, right click, or center click (even for those with a one-button mouse). Some objects will have to be dragged and dropped, others waved over, saying a mystical chant. But the end result of this experimentation should be a richer, far more engaging internet.

Emotionally Centered Design by Don Norman

Usability of Pedestrian Crossings

One old lady, who was one of the first pedestrians to use the new crossing in York Road, was not impressed.

She said: "That man Marples is up to too many tricks. It's a hairbrained scheme and most dangerous."

The panda crossing is activated when the pedestrian presses a button that lights up a "wait" sign.

This results in a flashing amber light warning drivers to stop.

After five seconds a pulsating red light tells the driver to stop and a "cross" sign is illuminated indicating to the pedestrian that it is safe to cross the road.

Eight seconds later the red light is replaced by a flashing amber light.

At the same time the "cross" sign begins to flash, at first slowly and then faster to warn the pedestrian that his time to cross the road is running out.

After 17 seconds both lights are extinguished and the driver is free to drive on.

BBC - On This Day 2 April

The Panda Crossing was superseded by the Pelican Crossing in 1969.

The Usability of Crossing Roads is a very interesting area of study.

TASK ANALYSIS FOR PEDESTRIANS AND DRIVERS USING CROSSING PLACES

KNOWLEDGE REVIEW ON THE USABILITY OF PEDESTIRAN CROSSING PLACES

One of the objectives of the knowledge review, task analysis, user workshops and observations of behaviour at pedestrian crossing places was to identify relevant elements of usability of crossing places and observables that could measure or act as proxies for good or bad usability. Findings in this respect are drawn together here, and in doing so the word users means both the pedestrians and the drivers negotiating a crossing place; where pedestrians and drivers are distinguished, they are referred to separately as such, and drivers includes riders of two-wheeled vehicles unless these are distinguished explicitly. Pedestrians include users of devices such as wheelchairs, pushchairs, shopping trolleys and wheeled toys

ELEMENTS OF USABILITY OF PEDESTRIAN CROSSING PLACES AND RELEVANT OBSERVABLES

What if Jakob Nielsen had a blog?

Some have criticised Jakob Nielsen for having an ugly site and people have wondered if useit.com would benefit from a design makeover.

Well I have got tired of waiting for Jakob to start a blog version of useit.com so I decided to build it myself.

I have organised the posts into five different categories one of which (Spoof or Joke etc.) contains content that is not from articles or links posted on useit.com

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What did you base the design on?
A. I got the inspiration from one of Jakob's jumpers (see blog for picture).

Q. Why have you done it?
A. It presents links to useit,com content using a 'modern' blog format that allows users to comment on alertbox articles directly. Think of it as an attemp to take the "fuddy duddy" out of Jakob Nielsen.

Q. Have you 'doctored' any of the content?
A. No, all content and links taken from useit,com are unaltered. Any spoof or humerous items are clearly categorised as such.

Q. What does Jakob think?
A. No idea, but I hope he sees the value in it.

Q. Have you followed weblog usability best practice?
A. Why nor read the Weblog Usabilty alertbox article and see how many design mistakes I have made.

Q. Why have you put google ads on the blog?
A. Any income from these ads will be used to offset hosting costs, but based on past experience I expect to be paying the bills out of my own pocket,

Q. Will this blog be kept up to date?
A. Yes.

Q. Where can I buy a t-shirt?
A. You can't. Why not buy one from OK/Cancel instead.

Q. How can I help?
A. Publicise the blog, subscribe to the feed and comment on the items.

I hope you enjoy my latest usability experiment.

Kate Bush Pi Controversy Continues

Bruce has drawn my attention to the latest Bush Pi kerfuffle on metafilter.

They are talking about the research done by Steve Luttrell which exposes the hidden messages in Kate Bush's Pi song.

I know what I am doing here. This is the sort of thing that I do in my professional life, where coding/decoding (and all that sort of thing) are things that are central to my work (have a look at www.luttrell.org.uk/papers to see what I mean), so I know a few tricks of the trade, and I am not a well-meaning fool who sees patterns in random noise. As far as possible, I have used Occam's Razor to make sure that my decodings have the minimum complexity that is consistent with the data (i.e. the song). This means that if I can find a single explanation for two or more features in the song then that is a good and economical decoding. Where a decoding is dubious, I say so.

It is quite challenging to use Occam's Razor, because you have to be able to find common explanations for different aspects of the song. For instance, it is important to be able to link the musical rendition of the song with its literal representation, which means that you have to resolve various puns. Kate likes her puns, both verbal and musical, so get used to it!

After you have done all of this, you realise that Kate hasn't merely sung the digits of the number p; she has built a very clever construction that has lots of hidden beauty. In fact, Kate has a beautiful mind! Basically, this is the reason that I got interested in this decoding problem, which led eventually to the creation of this web site.

I suggest you take a look at the work Steve has done and see what you think.