Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

Posted on March 5, 2002 - by deCadmus

A children’s riddle…

Q: What has four eyes but can’t see? A: The Mississippi river.

There’s another four-eyed monster that’s puzzled by that whole “vision” thing… the collective of Information Designers, Interaction Designers, Interface Designers and Information Architects. The “Four I” designation comes from Christina at elegant hack, who has, for some time now, tracked the progression of the fifth I — the Identity — of these complexly interrelated fields. In addition to entries in her daily gleanings, she offers a collection of definitions of Information Architecture [IA] in particular.

The identity issue isn’t new… and it embodies far more than the simple question of what’s in a name, although, since at least part of Information Architecture involves labeling systems, the name issue is particularly frustrating for some. Other questions are far more important, and more difficult to answer. What is the role of the Information Architect? What are the IA’s methods? What are the boundaries of the IA’s domain? And, perhaps most important [for me, certainly,] what are the goals of Information Architecture?

I’m not certain that the final question has been adequately answered… what’s more, I suspect the answer will reveal quite a lot about the emerging identity of Information Architecture, and maybe say something about all those other I’s. It’s a riddle worth solving.

Posted on February 27, 2002 - by deCadmus

Coffee Maker Usability

Mark Hurst of Creative Good has found his voice again. Among his first new blog entries is a shot at coffee makers…

“I’m not much of a coffee drinker, but one morning last week I was interested to see a friend of mine struggling with a new coffee maker. It was too hard to use. This Cuisinart model, some sort of all-in-one grinder and percolator, was loaded with high-tech buttons that seemed to do everything except make coffee. My friend — a technologist and veteran coffee drinker — was stumped. Maybe Starbucks sells so much overpriced brew because no one knows *how* to make coffee any more.”

As I spend an inordinate amount of time at the curious intersection of the user experience and specialty coffee, I simply had to write…

“…it’s far worse than you realize. Not only are latter-day coffee makers atrocities of user design, they are examples of utterly failed engineering throughout. Even if you were to successfully articulate the proper sequence of button pressing and clock setting; even if you loaded just-roasted coffee and purified water in their respective reservoirs; even if you follow *every* instruction to seven decimal places, you’ll end up with lousy coffee.

Why? Because there isn’t a single “home-use” auto-drip coffee maker on the U.S. market that meets the essential standards for water temperature, brew-time, turbulence, and extraction rates proscribed by the Specialty Coffee Association of America [the preeminent specialty coffee trade association.] You’ll achieve great coffee only by manually wresting control of one or more of these factors by choosing a comparatively “primitive” brew method: a coffee press, manual vacuum pot, or manual drip filter.”

I don’t think Mark will follow-up on his original article… he’s found that the coffee community can be quite vocal, and apparently the Cuisinart in question has some fierce proponents. Personally, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such mixed reviews for a single product.

Posted on February 23, 2002 - by deCadmus

Usable Reviews on Amazon

Last fall Amazon inked a deal with Target in which Amazon takes over much of Target.com’s distribution, customer service and eBiz infrastructure, while Target.com will sell books and music from Amazon.

Recent visits to Amazon suggest that at least part of the deal was about Amazon getting access to the sassy, sensually designed bric a brac that is the work of architect/designer Michael Graves. From coffee grinders to clocks, kettles to digital phones, Graves’ designs are curvy, playful and decidedly easy to look at — and they’re splashed all over the Amazon site.

The juxtaposition of Michael Graves’ trendy product line and Amazon’s system of consumer ratings and reviews offers an intriguing perspective…

The Graves Cordless Phone: “It is hard to hear people even with it cranked up to full volume. Confusing to use. Now has a red light flashing on it and I do not know why.” “The design is nice, but it is totally unusable as a phone. It makes a constant loud electronic sound like the sounds in sci fi movies from the ’50s.” “The phone had static no matter what channel you used and sometimes you could not answer it no matter how many times you pressed the talk button!!!”

The Graves Programmable Coffeemaker: “It looks so cute but just try to pour a freakin cup of coffee and it will go everywhere but your cup.” “No matter how careful or how slowly you try to pour it’s just a mess. I guess it’s a bad design. Sure it’s cute, but believe me that is the only thing good about this coffeemaker.”

The Graves Spinner Whistle Teakettle: “It doesn’t have any additional features other than its unique appearance, which frankly, looks more appealing on the web than in my kitchen.”

Easy to look at simply does not equate with easy to use… even when the products, and the designer, have won awards.

Posted on February 19, 2002 - by deCadmus

NYT on Ethnography

UBWA
The New York Times recently offered an amusing glimpse of commercial ethnography — Consuming Rituals of the Suburban Tribe. Its author aimed a soft-focus lens on field studies of typical American consumers… and even found a wizened ethnographer to quote, ”What consumers say and remember and what they actually do are often two totally different things.” The article — and its subject — proved offbeat, and quirky, and probably made the radar of New York television executives as fodder for a mid-season sitcom replacement. Interestingly, the article also pinged the the web’s favorite usability curmudgeon, Jakob Nielsen, who offered his critique in a recent Alertbox column. Don’t ask leading questions, says Jakob. And don’t draw attention to specific issues. Well… yes. And no.

There’s a tremendous amount that can be learned by simple observation. There is, however, far more that can be learned by engaging your test subject, or your customer, in frank and open conversation. A specific technique comes into play here — active listening — with which you may encourage your customer, restate facts, reflect feelings, and offer summary views to achieve clarity. None of these methods, skillfully executed, should be construed as leading, though any of these methods can be easily botched, particularly in a formal test environment. Which is why I’m particularly fond of informal testing… which I refer to as Usability by Walking Around… UBWA.

Long before I’d read anything by Tom Peters, I learned the principles of Management by Walking Around from managers who actively practiced it… walking the hallways, talking to employees, listening, and offering perspective. I made the same techniques my own when I became responsible for projects and products, and carried over a number of the same guiding principles when my interests turned to the field of usability. Just as it’s impossible to manage people and projects from some removed office, it’s impossible to practice usability from a far-off place — you must engage the people who use your products, as well as those who create them.

In a typical UBWA tour, I’ll start with the Help Desk team. These are folks on the front lines of customer issues… they know precisely who is having difficulty using your products, and they’re probably the very first to spot trends among user groups, or particular points of pain in new releases. Listen to them. Pay particular attention to those aspects that are less than tangible… these are issues that will probably never be reported up the food chain because they are difficult to measure and substantiate — and they often convey real insight into how your products are actually being used, as opposed to how they might have been designed to be used.

Continuing the tour, I’ll try to meet those same customers I’ve just learned of from the Help Desk team. If they are internal customers, this is easy. If they are external customers I may have to settle for a phone conversation… though if the issue is particularly thorny I’ll try to arrange an on-site visit — an informal visit — usually structured as “I’d just like to look over your shoulder as you step through X, Y and Z with our product.” Listen carefully. Listen actively. Reflect. Summarize. Ask, very casually, if you might take some notes. Be very careful, though, to not convey that this is in any way “on the record” — your customers’ tone, voice and manner will suddenly seize up — they are now filtering their own point of view.

Next on the tour… the development team. Just in time to referee a debate between the visual designers and the information architects. To be honest, there’s always a debate between the visual designers and the information architects… which is very likely a good thing. There’s nothing like a spirited exchange of ideas — even the bad ones [or, especially the bad ones] — to keep the overall customer experience meaningful. If it’s relevant to the conversation, this would be a good time to relate the conversations you’ve just had with your customer, to see if it sparks something. If it’s not relevant, save it for a better opportunity.

On to the marketing and sales groups… they’ll certainly want to know about the customer conversations, and they may have a point of view for the development team. Moreover, they’ve probably spoken to yet more customers and solicited additional feedback — feedback that probably needs to be squared against other sources. While sales and marketing teams have a valuable point of view, it’s a view that is very often one-dimensional. Listen. Trust. Verify.

Finally, a UBWA tour is rarely complete without a stop by the offices of my own management to offer a distilled version of today’s events and a general progress update. With luck I won’t find them in… they’ll be out walking around, too.

This is discount usability of the highest order. Simple. Cheap. Relevant. And unvarnished.

Posted on February 7, 2002 - by deCadmus

On the horns of a dilemma…

Like a great many web sites, I’ve got some difficult decisions ahead. New HTML specifications offer promising glimpses of compatibility and extensibility — XHTML, in particular — while at the same time widening the gap between current standards, and the hordes of folks still using 3.x and 4.x browsers. I have always maintained a rule of strict backward-compatibility, but for the first time I find that rule is getting in the way of progress… it’s unusually difficult to build pages — much less entire sites — that are congruent with, say, Netscape 4.07 and a 3G handheld device.

To gather some data for the decisions ahead I’ve embedded a script further down the page that reports Bloggle’s site statistics to WebTrends. After examining the mechanisms and privacy characteristics of a number of on-line statistics tools, I’m most comfortable with WebTrends’ method of aggregation — I think it has very little impact on user privacy. Moreover, I like it’s performance and its reliability. I *do* wish they offered a machine-readable privacy policy.

So, in the coming weeks I’ll be able to determine what the Bloggle aggregate looks like… in terms of browser versions, support for JavaScript, color depth and screen resolution. It’ll also be nifty to compare off-site statistics with those generated from my own web logs to get an idea how much caching is going on these days. I expect I’ll see a 20 to 30% difference in the page-view counts between the two mechanisms.

Meanwhile, Bloggle will be offering you a cookie or two… which you may accept or refuse as you like. Again… I have no desire to interfere with your privacy — or even your perception of privacy — I hope only to make Bloggle a very useful resource, and one that’s in-tune with its audience.

Posted on February 5, 2002 - by deCadmus

Everyday Design

Last Friday, Talk of the Nation Science Friday’s Ira Flatow spoke at some length with Don Norman, the user friendly half of the Nielsen-Norman group. I’ve been tremendously influenced by Don over the years. My copy of Don’s Psychology of Everyday Things is hopelessly dog-eared, and I’ve very much enjoyed The Invisible Computer, and Things That Make Us Smart. All good reading… and Ira, as always, leads a lively discussion.

A highlight: Michael Graves [architect, and designer of odds and ends and kitchen widgets sold at Target stores] is describing how he’d designed a new water faucet for the bathroom tub and shower. Ira asks how one goes about testing such a device. Michael lets slip that he uses focus groups. “No, no, no…!” interjects Don, “how would a focus group take a shower?”

;)

Posted on January 29, 2002 - by deCadmus

LCD Convergence

Pundits have for some time suggested a least common denominator approach to the convergence of mobile phones, PDAs and increasingly feature-laden devices. “If you can talk into it,” they say, “it’s a phone.”

A new generation of products, from Handspring’s Treo to Palm’s i705, to Nokia’s 5510, are at once exploring new niches, and entirely new modes of operation — always-on email access, digital music players, hand-held gaming — at the same time boasting increased screen resolution and color displays.

Draw a line between these new capabilities and the launch of long-promised 3G networks [Verizon is now online, and Sprint pledges to be only months away] and you’ll find yourself at the intersection of something that is decidedly new and promising. No least common denominator here.

Posted on January 24, 2002 - by deCadmus

It’s About Semantics

Peter Morville offers a thoughtful perspective on the battling twins of control and creativity that shape information architecture. He lists a number of complex adaptive systems: examples that include collaborative filtering, reputation management, and cooperative cataloging. I looked to similar systems as inspiration for bootstrapping the Yellow Corp. Intranet, referring to them as examples for mindful autonomy: independent actors, tasked with a similar goal and a cohesive outcome.

An example Peter doesn’t include is the Open Directory Project. Perhaps the Internet’s most comprehensive directory, the ODP is powered by tens of thousands of volunteer editors [not surprisingly, I edit Recreation/Food/Drink/Coffee], each of whom works autonomously, though with singular purpose, and with a number of tools to foster collaborative communication.

While you’re there, be sure to read Peter’s In Defense of Search, a well-armed response to Jared Spool’s Nielsenesque potshots at on-site search.

Posted on January 2, 2002 - by deCadmus

Happy New Year?

“On Jan. 1, 300 million people in 12 countries will start using some funny-looking money they have never seen before. Months later their old familiar bills and coins will buy them nothing. Many of these people will have only a vague idea of what is going on. This could be a lot more fun than all of that overhyped millennium crap.”

Posted on December 28, 2001 - by deCadmus

10 True Things

Ya just gotta love these guyz…
If you read nothing else on the Web today, read this: 10 things Google has found to be true. Can it really be just that simple? Yes. Absolutely, yes. -Link lifted from Christina at elegant hack.-