Apple MacBook Air most usable compared to competition ...

"When it comes to laptops, ultrathin is in -- particularly since the launch of Apple's MacBook Air earlier this year. As might be expected, though, the Air isn't the only game in town -- skinny laptops are available from a variety of other vendors.

However, stylish doesn't always mean functional. You needn't look further than the latest style in women's shoes to know that what looks good isn't necessarily comfortable. Is the MacBook Air with its ultrasvelte shape actually as comfortable to use as larger, more traditionally shaped laptops? And, come to that, what about its competitors? How easy are they to use?

Note that we're not talking about the low-cost ultraportable laptops like the Asus Eee and Everex CloudBook. These laptops are larger and more full-featured. For instance, that new breed of ultraportables has, at most, 10-in. displays, while the smallest display in this group was 12.1 inches. However, they also contain a number of compromises (such as tweaked keyboards or less ports) that could affect the user experience.

To find out how these thin notebooks really rate, we asked the usability experts at Perceptive Sciences, an Austin user experience testing firm, to run the Air and two Windows-based ultrathin laptops -- the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 and the Toshiba Portege R500-S5002-- through a gamut of hands-on tests with 20 independent users.

So how does the much-ballyhooed MacBook Air stack up against its competitors? Here's what we learned.

Air and its competitors

Before we get to the results, a few words are in order about the laptops themselves and how we tested them.

Apple's MacBook Air has garnered a lot of publicity since its introduction in January, largely because of how thin it is -- at its thickest point it's a scant 0.76 inches thick. Weighing in at three pounds, the Air might be easy to carry, but it is comparatively powerful, with a 13.3-in. display and an Intel 1.6-GHz Core 2 Duo processor and an 80GB hard drive.

Although they haven't received the level of attention that the MacBook has, the skinny offerings from Toshiba and Lenovo have been well reviewed as well. The Lenovo ThinkPad X300, which was introduced in February 2008, is slightly lighter but also slightly thicker than Apple's offering and has the same size display as the Air. The review unit had a 1.2-GHz Core 2 Duo processor and, uniquely for this group, a 64GB solid-state drive.

Toshiba's Portege R500-S5002 has a particular emphasis on lightness. At 2.4 pounds, the company has been claiming it is the world's lightest full laptop. The trade-off is in screen size; at 12.1 inches, the R500 has the smallest display in this group. Like the Lenovo, this laptop came with a 1.2-GHz Core 2 Duo processor. It also had a standard 120GB hard drive. (We were told after testing began that the Portege R500-S5002 has been discontinued; however, a Toshiba representative assured us that the size of the current model, the Portege R500-S5006V, which comes with a 160GB hard drive and a 1.33-GHz processor, is the same.)"    (Continued via Computer World, David Haskin)    [Usability Resources]

Apple MacBook Air

Words are critical to task completion on websites and in applications. Yet they are still chosen carelessly. "Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button?" Jakob Nielsen asked in his excellent Alertbox in May 2008. I have two questions here: Why do we need a Cancel button in most situations? Why is the OK button called OK?

Some time ago, I was entering a number into a web form. Let's say I entered "120,000". When I clicked Next the following message came back:

Sorry! That does not appear to be a valid number. Please try again OK

The OK button stared out at me, and I thought: 'This is not OK. You've told me that I've entered an invalid number. Well, it looks pretty valid to me, and even if it is invalid, as you say, you haven't told me why. You haven't told me how I can correct the error of my ways.'

Most times I come across the OK button, something not-OK has happened. It's like my cat coming into our kitchen and saying. "Hello Gerry. Just wanted to let you know I did a pee in the sitting room. OK." Well, sorry, it's not OK. Who decided to call this not-OK button OK? What sort of logic was at work inside their mind? I belong to a group of people that really cares about words. I think they're precious and incredibly powerful things. I think that web behavior is driven by words. Get your words exactly right and you will be much more successful on the Web.

I know that there are lots of people out there that think words are trivial things. These are the people who choose OK when it is patently not-OK. The OK button may be a bad choice of word, but the Cancel button is probably not even necessary in most situations. Cancel has a first cousin called Clear. I've filled out a lot of forms over the years but only once did I need to use the Clear button.

A strange thing had happened to me on that occasion. I looked at a form I had just filled out and gasped: "John O'Neill is not my name! And that's not my address! And that's definitely not my age!! I'm much younger than that!" So I used the Clear button and started again. Did you ever wonder why there is often a row of buttons on the sleeves of men's jackets, or why there is often a slit at the back? The slit is there for horse riding. The buttons are there because it was a custom some centuries ago to roll up and button the sleeves. I notice that many web forms I now come across don't have Clear. This button might have had a purpose back in the days of mainframes, but today it probably hinders more than it helps.

Words matter. Simplicity matters. Choosing the right word for your customer is no easy task but it can deliver tremendous value. Stripping away all extra words and buttons is the path to simplicity. It requires a deep understanding of the fundamental nature of the customer's task."    (Continued via Usability News, Gerry McGovern)    [Usability Resources]

Recruiting participants for user research ...

"User research works best when you match your participants to the people who will use your designs. It makes sense that teams would try to use the demographics, often compiled by the organization's market research team, as the basis of their recruiting efforts. However, this can be problematic.

To explore why this might not be such a good idea, I recently talked with usability expert, Dana Chisnell. Dana is the co-author of the recently published second edition of the Handbook of Usability Testing, and runs UsabilityWorks, a San Francisco usability research consultancy. Dana's organization recruits hundreds of participants every month for teams all over the world, so she is well familiar with the traps of using demographics. Here's what she had to say about it:

UIE: Recently, we've had a bunch of clients come to our doorsteps thinking they know who they should be recruiting for their usability tests. But what they really have are demographics, such as "70% are males between the ages of 18 and 24." I thought we could talk about why demographics are the wrong way to think about getting test participants.

Do clients come to you with demographics as a description of their ideal usability test participant?

Dana Chisnell: This happens all the time. Especially if marketing or market research is sponsoring the study you're recruiting for, it can be really hard to break out of matching market segments.

Recently, a client came to us (my recruiting consultant, Sandy Olson, and me) wanting to bring people into the lab to compare PC security software. They gave us a screener with percentages. How do you get percentages of individuals?

They wanted 25% of their 24 participants to be between the ages of 30 and 39. They wanted 50% of their participants to be female, 50% to be male. They wanted participants who were professionals, broken down into nine categories. One category was "Banking, investments, and real estate." Another was "Engineering, other." There was also "Education, training, students."    (Continued via UIE, Jared Spool)    [Usability Resources]

The need for boundaries in games ...

"['Why can't I jump over that wall?' In this intriguing design article, Sidhe's Griffiths (Gripshift) examines the usability-related issues - and solutions - for frustratingly invisible and unbreakable barriers in games.]

Throughout our everyday life, we come across barriers and boundaries which prohibit our movement. We instantly recognize them and know what we need to do when we come face to face. Some barriers we can easily circumvent; a door, for example, temporarily blocks our way until we open it and step through to the other side.

Games are the same. When we are in the game world we come across barriers which block our path and force us to turn around or open them up and step through to the other side. The problem with barriers in games is that they are sometimes not that distinctive.

What happens when we cannot tell the difference between a "friendly" barrier (one which we can interact with in some way) and one which is so unmovable that a nuclear missile wouldn't make a dent? More importantly, how does the player feel and what do they do to overcome this?

This article looks at the various techniques used by game developers to blockade our paths and, from a usability perspective, what it means for gamers.

The Issue

Gaming technology is incredible. With new hardware advancements, developers are bringing us bigger and more exciting worlds. We often have the opportunity to roam for miles or to actually walk through entire cities, exploring seemingly every nook and cranny.

But what happens when there are areas in the game that developers don't want us to get to? Usually there is some kind of barrier that halts our progress or, alternately, an element of the story of the game which explains our inability to continue onward.

These boundaries are needed for a number of reasons, not least of all due to the fact that no matter how good our technology is, we simply cannot create a truly open-ended world. It is just not possible at the moment.

Boundaries also help us learn areas of the maps, because if everything was open to us at once then it would likely be simply too overwhelming to take in. By opening things up slowly to the player, we are introducing a gradual learning curve.

Another use of the barriers is to simply stop us from trying to go down certain areas of the game which simply don't exist. We can't have the players running everywhere because this means we have to create massive environments when it's simply not needed. So to overcome this we simply create barriers that halt the player's progression in certain areas.

The Answer: Human Computer Interaction

However, it is with these barriers and boundaries that a problem lies with game design usability. Unbeknown to players they actually rely heavily on two key principles in the field of Human Computer Interaction, or HCI: visibility and affordance.

In HCI texts, visibility and affordance applies to the controls that users can see. Donald Norman defines visibility as "Controls need to be visible which implies that there is good mapping between the controls and their affects. For example, the controls on a driver's dashboard have good visibility whilst video recorders have not." 1

Affordance is a technical term that refers to the properties of objects and how they can be used. A door "affords" opening. However, in HCI, what is more important is perceived affordance. This entails what the person thinks can be done with the object. Does the door suggest it should be pushed or pulled?

So how does this translate into games and game design specifically? Well for our discussion, we are looking at the game-world itself - the actual environment - and therefore we need to ensure that the players are always able to see their path through the game.

We should never have a situation whereby the player ends up at one point just sitting there, scratching their heads and unable to figure out where to go. This is not the same as a game which requires the player to figure out where to go."    (Continued via Gamasutra, Gareth Griffiths)    [Usability Resources]

Developing a more usable CAPTCHA ...

"You may have never heard of a CAPTCHA, but if you spend any time on the internet, you've definitely seen one. CAPTCHAs most often take the form of distorted words that a visitor has to type in to complete an action, and are designed as a test to tell humans from programs.

The current state-of-the-art of is reCAPTCHA, pictured below:

Current CAPTCHA

From a usability standpoint, CAPTCHA represents a hurdle for human visitors. While people who design CAPTCHAs are trying to solve a very real and difficult problem, the war against malicious programs and spammers has escalated to the point where it has a human toll, and we need to seek out alternatives.

The Captcha Arms Race

Unfortunately, the current incarnation of CAPTCHA is a losing proposition. Originally, it made sense to use reading to tell humans from programs; reading is easy for most people and difficult for computers, and words represent an almost unlimited task variety. Unfortunately, as computers get faster and programmers get more creative, creating a secure, word-based CAPTCHA means making the reading task increasingly more difficult, which adversely effects human users. Computers are getting better and better at reading all of the time, while our reading ability as adult humans stays roughly the same (and often gets worse as we age). Logically, it's only a matter of time before simple, word-based CAPTCHA is completely ineffective.

The Sesame Street Solution

So, how do we up the difficulty level for computers without hurting people? For word-based CAPTCHA, we've really only followed one path: making the words more and more difficult to read. What if, instead of making the answer more difficult, we focused on the question?

If you ever watched Sesame Street you probably remember the game "One of these things is not like the other." We humans are naturally good at detecting differences; it's an evolutionary necessity and built into many of our sensory systems. Consider the examples below:

Detecting Differences

In all of these, you can easily tell which of the 3 words is different. Now, consider asking a computer the question: "Which word is different?". Current technology could easily read the three words in every example above, but how does a machine parse the word "different"? Does it mean red, bold, italicized, green, underlined?

By making the question ambiguous, we've added a layer of difficulty for machines that's easily resolvable for humans. This "Difference CAPTCHA" could allow us to increase the level of security without increasing word distortion. Granted, it's not a perfect solution, and has many of the issues CAPTCHA currently has, but it taps a strength of human brains and at least buys us a bit more time in the arms race."    (Continued via User Effect)    [Usability Resources]

Practical tips for building a website ...

"Time and time again, I have seen companies struggle with Web site design projects. Initial Web site design and redesigns of existing sites may each face a few different challenges, but overall, they are similar. My experience has been that these problems are not technical issues, but project management and cultural issues. Often, no one follows a game plan — they just blindly rush off and attempt to re/design the Web site with little forethought. On the other hand, I have also been through a number of successful Web site re/design projects (measured by, “Did we get a good-looking, usable Web site deployed in a reasonable amount of time?”). Here are some of the things I’ve learned to do that will help make any Web site design project go smoothly.

Note: This information is also available as a PDF download.

#1: Politely keep those who lack a clue out of the process

It is amazing, isn’t it, how all you need is a rumor of a “Web site project” and the company president, CFO, VP of Facilities, and other people with zero Web design knowledge suddenly inject themselves into the process? Your job (or your project manager’s job) is to get them out of the process as soon as possible.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do this. The right way is to show these other groups that you will do more than pay lip service to getting their input, while also showing them that you will come to them with a targeting group of questions driven by their areas of expertise. The wrong way is to just stop inviting them to the meetings or ignore what they have to say. When you involve them in the process in a limited “subject matter” capacity and take action upon their recommendations when sensible, everyone walks away feeling like they played a part. When you give them the cold shoulder, those who have been shunned will turn every problem with the new site into an opportunity to say, “If only they had listened to me….”

#2: Prototype on paper before coding

One of the attractive aspects of HTML is that it is relatively quick and easy to prototype designs in. One of the fatal flaws of too many Web projects is that designers start prototyping in HTML before doing anything on paper. HTML prototypes do, of course, play a valuable role in the design process, but my experience has been that it is best to not create any until the design concepts have been narrowed down to one or two (three, at the most) potential designs.

HTML prototypes take a lot more time to create than paper prototypes (particularly of the “wireframe” type). You can sketch out a few boxes on paper to represent navigation elements, logos, footers, etc., in a few moments in a meeting, and everyone can get the idea instantly. Alternatively, you can spend 30 minutes hashing together a skeleton of HTML, adding Lorem ipsum text all over the place, finding a location where the IT department will let you upload it, putting it up, testing it, tweaking out a few obvious glitches, and sending out an e-mail with the link.

After all of that, what happens? The people who look at it get confused because it is a basic prototype. They want to know where the logo is, or why they clicked on the Contact Us link and nothing happened, or why the navigation elements are in the order you put them in. In other words, HTML prototypes are deadly, precisely because to those inexperienced with the concept of a prototype, it looks like a really bad design. They get hung up on precisely the things that make it a prototype. So do your initial prototyping on paper, and with the time and energy you save, you can make sure that the few HTML prototypes you do make are more fleshed out.

#3: Build your site map before you start designing

One of the deadly sins in Web site design is trying to draw up a design without having a site map. I’m not saying that you need to know every single page before you can decide whether to put the navigation at the top or on the left. What I am saying is that the navigation hierarchy gets driven from the desired relationship of pages to each other. And since it is impossible to decide where to place navigation elements without knowing how many items will be in each one or how many elements you will need, a site map really is the prerequisite to a site design.

For example, let’s say that you settle on having a navigation bar directly underneath the header, and after you’ve invested a lot of time in this design, you discover that your site would be better served by a list of links on the left instead. That’s a lot of wasted time. Get your site map first. Once you have a decent idea of how the pages relate to each other, then you can start drafting designs."    (Continued via TechRepublic, Justin James)    [Usability Resources]

New UI look and feel ...

"Aza Raskin released a new project today called Algorithm Ink. For the full story check out his explanation and video. The app is basically a “grown up version of Logo”—a front-end to a simple programming language for creating fractal images. While the fractal art is the main attraction, I was more interested in the unconventional UI.

Algorithm Ink continues the style that Aza demonstrated six months ago with Songza. His UI comes from another planet where Microsoft Windows never caught on and Hypercard rules the world. There are no native form widgets, no scroll bars, and nary a “Submit Query" or Cancel” in sight. Normally this is a recipe for confusion, but in Aza’s case the results are often models of clarity and intentionality.

On Songza, the most noticable break from convention was the mouse-flower. Traditionally, a web UI for playing a song would consist of the song’s title, a widget to play/pause, and some adjacent links to share, rate, etc. Instead Songza only shows the song title. When you click the title, a flower opens with an action on each petal like “Play” or “Share.” You can click a petal or mouse away from the flower to dissolve it. The jury’s still out on mouse-flowers, but the clutter-free UI they enabled should raise an eyebrow.

On Algorithm Ink, the header is what interested me. Each of the grey buttons (Edit, Save, Browse, etc.) is actually a toggle between an “on” state and an “off” state. When a button is “on”, a panel appears on top of the canvas with the functionality for that button.

For example, when you click “Edit”, the button turns on and a panel is revealed with the code for the current artwork. You don’t “Save” or “Cancel” to leave edit mode. Instead you click the red “Draw” button to apply your changes, or click Edit again to hide the panel."    (Continued via 37 signals, Signal vs. Noise)    [Usability Resources]

Edit Button Visible

Hummm, something to think about ...

"Some designers think User-Centered Design (UCD) is a “philosophy”—one to be developed and nurtured throughout an organization, from the ground up.

It’s not.

First, a little perspective on UCD and its friends. UCD, Activity-Centered Design (ACD), Goal-Directed Design (GDD), the unfortunately named “Genius Design” (GD), and others have many things in common, but they also have very real differences. These approaches are defined through their goals and their deliverables. Through their pros and cons. Through their areas of overlap (of which there are many). And through the ways they fit into typical development processes (Agile, for example).

All of these approaches have a common goal—to create valuable, useful, and usable (and hopefully even enjoyable) products and services for customers.

But beyond this commonality, practitioners of each approach take a different path to achieving that goal. With UCD, the design effort is, obviously, centered on users (what they need, what they want, etc). With ACD, the design effort is centered around a user’s whole activity. In GDD, the design effort is centered around a user’s goals. While these approaches have a lot of overlap, the differences are mainly in the practices and deliverables.

With UCD, a practice is to perform user research and a deliverable is a set of persona descriptions. With ACD, a practice is activity research, and a deliverable is a breakdown of the activity’s tasks, actions, and operations. And so on.

On any given project, we can mix and match practices and deliverables quite a bit, and ultimately, it really doesn’t matter to managers how success is achieved or what the approach is used or what it’s called, as long as it is successful and repeatable.

But other departments within a company have different purposes, different methods, different processes and practices and deliverables. Yes, they should still be focused on customers, but they achieve this in very different ways than a designer. The Accounting department, for example, should be very focused on customers, but it would defy logic to use UCD practices in an Accounting department.

Hence, User-Centered Design is not a philosophy. It’s an action. It’s an approach."    (Continued via rhjr.net, Robert Hoekman)    [Usability Resources]

An interesting design strategy ...

"David Lewis, Bang & Olufsen’s chief designer, discusses the company’s unusual approach to design with The Wall Street Journal.

Along the way he reveals the pioneering B&O design team only spends 2-3 days a month at B&O headquarters and works externally the rest of the time, they never meet, they have no fixed process, and they build initial versions of products out of cardboard and paper.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: You spend just two or three days per month at B&O headquarters in Struer. Doesn’t this slow the design process?

MR. LEWIS: It’s a great, concentrated way of working. I come fresh and clean every other Friday all the way from Copenhagen and see things in a different way, because I am not at all part of the system there. I sit down with the engineers and go through 10 or so projects in various stages. There are thousands of things to discuss — the minutiae of angles, coloring, buttons, graphics and more.

This is not just my way of working. All designers for B&O — not just me and my team of six — are external. The company believes in it. My six-member team aside, designers for B&O don’t ever meet, we don’t have any cooperation with one another at all.

WSJ: How does the design process work when you are rarely on-site?

MR. LEWIS: Every time we design a new product, it’s like starting all over. Time frames, technology and demands are different each time. So we don’t have a process per se.

My designers and I do have an approach, though. Whether we are given a brief for a new product or we come up with an idea on our own — and it’s a fair mix of the two — we don’t sketch it. We model it out of cardboard, pieces of paper, little bits of plastic, whatever’s on hand.

We build it up little by little, the way a sculptor does. We stand around the object, have an open dialogue and modify it as we go along. Then, I bring that same model along when I go to Struer. That way all sides can see what the design is about and why it’s essential to do it this way and not another."    (Continued via 37signals, Signal vs. Noise)    [Usability Resources]

Bang & Olufsen

Why visitors leave your site ...

"Different traffic sources imply different reasons for why visitors might immediately leave your site. Design to keep deep-link followers engaged through additional pageviews.

A huge increase in "deep dips" was one of the big findings in our new user research for this year's Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability seminar. That is, ever-more users are arriving deep within websites rather than entering them through the homepage.

The homepage is still important, and you should continue to ensure homepage usability for two main reasons:

* The homepage is typically the single most-visited page, because the deep entry points are scattered across a vast number of interior pages.
* The homepage is the orienteering point for visitors who arrive through deep links and then decide to explore the site further.

For many sites, the deep-dip increase has an unfortunate consequence: much bigger bounce rates.

The bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who turn around at the entry page and immediately leave the site. Such visitors "bounce" out and never see additional pages.

"Unique Visitors" Must Die

Given growing bounce rates, we must stop using "unique visitors" as a metric for site success. Site tourists who leave a site immediately ratchet up the unique visitor count, but don't contribute long-term value.

On the contrary, bouncers should be considered a negative statistic: the site failed to engage them enough to entice even a second pageview.

To measure site success, you should count only loyal users who return repeatedly. Or, if your site is such that most people will visit only once, at least require that they exhibit a minimum amount of engagement before you count them as a positive statistic.

Chasing higher unique-visitor counts will undermine your long-term positioning because you'll design gimmicks rather than build features that bring people back and turn them into devotees and customers."    (Continued via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)    [Usability Resources]

Reasons for universal design these days ...

"The concept of universal design is not new. Inclusive processes aimed at enabling all of us to experience the full benefits of products, environments, communications, systems and policies regardless of our age, size, situation, and abilities have been around since the mid-1970s. However, the incorporation of universal design has been a ‘slow go’ in design education, practice and contemporary culture in most countries. There are several reasons for this:

* The design disciplines have been, for the most part, style based. In other words, aesthetics, form, and the way something looks have dominated graphic design, interior design, architecture, and industrial design for centuries.
* Since their beginning, accrediting bodies for design programs in universities have emphasized formal and structural principles as their primary criteria. Because programs were evaluated on these terms, curricula naturally centered on them, often at the expense of other important issues such as social inclusion.
* Until recently, ergonomists, engineers, designers and manufacturers have focused on the large majority in the middle of the population curve and have, more or less, ignored those in the minority. Accommodating those in ranges beyond a ‘theoretical average’ has been considered, for the most part, too costly and complex in the production of products and built environments.
* Popular media has tended to present distorted views of our culture that favor specific aesthetic sensibilities and lifestyles for the sake of entertainment value, and that disregard other realities. More accurate reflections of our world and its peoples often require us to confront harsh realities and to put ourselves into situations that challenge our comfort levels. This is especially the case in cultures where child care, health care, and elder care have been highly compartmentalized, and, therefore, separated from daily living.

According to Kathryn Anthony in her influential book, Designing for Diversity, most design professionals agree that to produce relevant design work, particularly as we move into a more globalized environment, designers should have knowledge and understanding about cultures and populations other than their own. Knowledge about inclusion and its relationship to design is a crucial part of this endeavor. Yet incorporating these issues into already overburdened design practices and production processes has been a somewhat daunting task.

But there is good news. Recently, universal design has been cropping up in places in which it would have been unwelcome twenty years ago. The term is now peppered throughout design firm websites, product websites, and design magazines. More and more, design competitions are including universal design criteria in their briefs. In the past few years, social justice, inclusion, and universal design have been topics at several major design conferences as well as product, technology, and building conventions. Courses addressing diversity and universal design are cropping up in academic programs and continuing education worldwide, and design practices are starting to realize the importance of this approach. Perhaps most important, governments around the world are beginning to include universal design principles in their policies and plans for future development."    (Continued via uiGarden.net, Beth Tauke)    [Usability Resources]

Getting information just in time ...

"The latest release of google maps added in location for all of us with GPS-free devices. This works just fine for me, as I know how to navigate so don’t go much for routing software anyway. I often pull out the maps when I am somewhere different from last time, so if I want to drive somewhere, now it gets me to the ballpark, at least. And for my other use case – search an area for restaurants, or tires or stencil ink – it’s perfect.

Except when it’s not. Saturday my wife and I took some bunnies orphaned from someone else’s lawnmower accident out to the woods to be released. They did fine. But getting there was too difficult. I popped open the map to remind myself how to get there. G-maps had an issue getting location, probably because we were down in the low-lands along the river, but I was fine and just used it like always, as a scrolling map. Found the location, then the app decided it knows where I am… and moves me over there.

Yeah, it was inaccurate by several miles. But regardless, I had manually scrolled and zoomed to someplace, and therefore I probably care about it. What possessed Google to disregard user input, and scroll me over to where they think I should be looking?

Similar things happen all too often on mobiles. While typing a text message, a full-screen alert interrupts you to say a new message has arrived, maybe destroying the current composition. It’s almost impossible to type web addresses on most phones, because the useful symbols are hidden away. It takes six keypresses to find out what call you just missed because you couldn’t get to the phone on time. It’s easier to accidentally completely delete a new MMS than to send it.

Not all of these happen to everyone, every day, but they are typical issues. These are the sorts of things I have to listen to when I tell people I am a mobile designer. And they are not just bad in some vague way because they annoy users, but because the device is ignoring context.

Yes, context again. Any time now, as we keep saying, context awareness is going to cause all sorts of neat things to be possible, but there is already some of it available, just by looking at the design of the software and interaction:

* Keep in mind the likely tasks of your application or function; feature all the important tasks, downgrade less-important ones, eliminate (or add barriers to) dangerous ones

* Focus on the important information. Show me the search results, or the map, or the incoming message. Advertising, upgrade messages, meta-data, network details, tips & tricks or almost anything else needs to be delayed, pushed towards the edge or hidden entirely.

* Help the user perform their tasks. When entering numbers, don’t let them type words. Limits are good, if they assist the user in completing a task. (We look forward to seeing robust input management return to most mobile browsers)."    (Continued via Little Springs Design)    [Usability Resources]

All about wireframes ...

"I recently presented at a conference on the humble wireframe and thought it would be a good idea to run through some key points. I have also noted that some feel the wireframe is dead, though if anything its more alive now than ever. Pay heed to 37 signal’s take on the subject…

If a wireframe document is destined to stop and never directly become the actual design, don’t bother doing it. If the wireframe starts as a wireframe and then morphs into the actual design, go for it.

In the presentation I attempted to answer these questions;

Wireframes

* • What are they?
* • Why do we use them?
* • When should they be used?
* • What are the different types?
* • How are they used in a project life cycle?
* • Why are they important?

What are they?

They are a visual representation of the content of a web page that is the culmination of user research, business objectives and content.

Best brought together in a sequence of pages to illustrate paths of navigation and interactions on the page.

They are working documents that are not finished designs but are likely to change as the design process progresses and functional requirements are clarified.

They are NOT…

* • Meant for an external audience without an explanation of context
* • Meant to be the design of a page
* • To portray any graphic elements
* • To convey the brand of a website"    (Continued via User Pathways)    [Usability Resources]

Wireframe

Video of interaction with Microsoft's Surface ...

"Part of Steve Seow's job on the Surface team is understanding how people use and interact with the Surface computer - from dragging things around to pressing buttons and more. They gather a tremendous amount of data that helps them improve the overall experience and in the end impacts what we all see, touch, and sync.

Checkout this video from inside their usability testing lab. You'll also see how the Surface team uses Toshiba M700 Tablet PCs to assist them in the testing process.

You'll have to excuse the shakiness of this video - I didn't have my tripod with me."    (Continued via GottaBeMobile, Rob Bushway)    [Usability Resources]

Interacting with Surface Tablet

Good mobile design screens ...

"Nokia has just published a document with 10 examples of what they consider good mobile design. It is a mix of applications and mobile web sites. Many of the usual suspects, but also a couple of lesser knowns.

I do not necessarily agree with everything. (Surprise, right? :-)) One of the criteria is "Visual WOW" and Jaiku Mobile is considered "stylish". To me Jaiku Mobile looks like its designed by a MySpace user high on banana peel and bad Klingon poetry. The application runs on top of whatever Theme the user has chosen for their phone, so maybe unfair to criticize it. Anyway, "lively" was probably a design objective. Jaiku was acquired by Google last year and they closed new sign-up. So unless you know an existing Jaiku user, you won't be able to check it out.

Fring is another of the examples. I tried it quite a while ago, but I just couldn't figure it out. Setup required me to configure my "IP telephony signaling protocol", so I backed out, thinking "maybe next version". Fring makes calls and messaging over WiFi and is a way cool concept. Maybe it's time to give Fring another try.

Good examples and interesting evaluations. Definitely worth having a look, as the examples are some of the most used 3rd party mobile applications out there today. You can find the document here."    (Continued via Sender 11, Small Surfaces)    [Usability Resources]

Mobile Screen Example

Good advice for better user experience ...

"The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is “Googley” – and will satisfy and delight people all over the world.

The ten principles that contribute to a “Google User Experience” are:

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams
2. Every millisecond counts
3. Simplicity is powerful
4. Engage beginners and attract experts
5. Dare to innovate
6. Design for the world
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind
9. Be worthy of people’s trust
10. Add a human touch"    (Continued via Putting people first)    [Usability Resources]

Rationalizations and ethical design ...

"Designers rationalize their choices just as much as everyone else. But we also play a unique role in shaping the human world by creating the expressive and functional tools many people use in their daily lives. Our decisions about what is and is not ethical directly impact the lives of a tremendous number of people we will never know. Better understanding of the choices we make as designers can help us create more ethical user experiences for ourselves and for everyone.

In Part 1 of this series on Designing Ethical Experiences, “Social Media and the Conflicted Future,” I explored the familiar dynamic in which design mediates unresolved conflicts between business stakeholders and users by making unethical compromises and looked at changes in technology and culture that make this unhealthy dynamic more likely in the future. In Part 2, “Designing Ethical Experiences: Some Practical Suggestions,” I outlined some practical techniques for effectively resolving ethical conflicts during our design efforts by adapting existing user experience tools and methods.

In this third installment, I’ll explore the surprising mix of misperceptions, biases, and cognitive mechanisms underlying the decisions people make when facing ethical choices, which unfortunately encourage us to come up with juicy rationalizations for unethical decisions.
Not As Ethical As We Think

“People believe they will behave ethically in a given situation, but they don’t. They then believe they behaved ethically when they didn’t. It is no surprise, then, that most individuals erroneously believe they are more ethical than the majority of their peers.”—Ann E. Tenbrunsel, Kristina A. Diekman, Kimberly A. Wade-Benzoni, and Max H. Bazerman.

As in the mythical town where every child is above average, it is obviously impossible for everyone to be more ethical than his fellows. Surprisingly, however, consistent findings from psychology, management, sociology, and economics research show our ethical behavior is quite a bit worse than we imagine. We not only choose unethical options more often that we think when facing ethical dilemmas, but after the fact, we also change our ethical standards and our memories to justify the many unethical decisions we make. [2]

Considerable research on decision making and business ethics shows a powerful combination of cognitive distortions, shifting perceptions, and personal biases—a combination that recalls the dialogue about juicy rationalizations from “The Big Chill”—heavily affect the choices we make when faced with ethical dilemmas. To shed light on the mechanisms that affect our decisions, I will summarize some of the most relevant research, with an emphasis on how these findings relate to user experience design. It seems we all carry a bit of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse."    (Continued via UXmatters, Joe Lamantia)    [Usability Resources]

The future of multi-touch ...

"Touching is fun. It's really fun to touch gadgets, and navigate user interfaces using your fingers. And while you're walking through your digital home in 2013, you'll be doing a lot of touching all the time.

Some laptops already use biometric finger scans to access data or locked devices. But the real growth area is screen-based touch technology to navigate data, applications, and functions. Touch has quickly become an important frontier in the tech industry and there are no signs of it slowing down. And with the advent of the iPhone and Microsoft's Surface technology, more companies are jumping on board and doing all they can to create products that offer an intuitive experience without sacrificing usability.

The touchscreen market is split into two areas: single-touch and multi-touch. Generally speaking, single-touch technology only allows you to interact with the screen in one area at a time. Most commonly found in smartphones like the Palm Treo, it's unlikely that single touch will be the dominant touch technology in the digital home of 2013.

On the other hand (excuse the pun), multi-touch technology is quickly becoming the most popular touchscreen implementation on the market. Unlike single touch, multi-touch allows you to interact with multiple points on a device at the same time and offers much greater flexibility and usability. Multi-touch will sneak its way into your digital home before you know it.

According to Microsoft, its Surface product should be available to consumers by the end of the decade. Surface promises to let owners control their technology in a whole new way -- "grabbing" data with their hands and moving it between objects with natural gestures, instead of using of a keyboard and mouse. Although it has yet to prove its commercial viability, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates have said that this type of functionality will be begin to appear in the next version of the company's operating system, Windows 7."    (Continued via The Industry Standard, Don Reisinger)    [Usability Resources]

A discussion on the importance and use of content ...

"I feel sorry for the poor, poor words that no one wants to take responsibility for. And I feel especially sorry for site users who end up with a terrible experience because, after all the money was spent on UX strategy and interface design, the content still ended up sucking. — Kristina Halvorson

In May 2008, Kristina Halvorson from Brain Traffic spoke at Adaptive Path’s Queens of Content event. Her presentation “Content Strategy: The Mania, the Myth, the Method” shed light on current perceptions of content strategy in user experience, and provided great fodder for further exploration. I was particularly intrigued by what Kristina had to say, because while I agreed with the overarching message, I felt compelled to debate some of the finer points.

Kristina agreed to push the thinking further with a discussion about content, UX teams, and how the relationships can be strengthened to create experiences and projects that really sing. The resulting conversation start with content basics and closes with a bold challenge.

Kate Rutter [KR]: Hi, Kristina. Let’s start with what you ended with in your talk at Adaptive Path. This was my takeaway: user experience teams hold the charter to deliver great experiences, but bringing in “content” at the end-game undercuts the positive experiences that are delivered. It’s as if the movie poster is great, the trailer is thrilling, but when it comes to opening night, everyone is looking around asking “where’s the film?” How can we work together to change this?

Kristina Halvorson [KH]: To begin, let’s reframe this a bit. I think the point here is that, by waiting until the UX process is essentially finished to start really talking about the content, we’re not allocating appropriate time and resources for what can ultimately make or break the planned/designed “positive experience.”

KR: How do you define or describe “content”?

KH: Content includes the text, graphics, video, and audio that make up an interactive experience. Now, I’ll say right off that bat that the majority of content we’re asked to gather, write, and edit at Brain Traffic is text. This sounds simple enough, until you stop to consider that the required content for nearly every interactive experience includes not just headlines and articles but also help and support text, interface copy, product or service descriptions, menu nomenclature, text links, metadata, image captions, error messages, alt tags — you get the idea. Once you start to add up all the writing requirements for any interactive project, it can get really overwhelming, really fast.

KR: Yeah, that’s a lot of stuff. I’ve heard you say that content is everyone’s concern. But as we all know, when everyone is responsible, it often turns out that no one is responsible. And it sounds like many UE initiatives suffer from this problem.

So what roles are appropriate for being the standard-bearers for content? Who are these people and what skills do they need?

KH: First and foremost, all parties focused specifically on delivering the content — content strategists, Web editors, Web writers, and content QA folks — absolutely, positively must share the end goal of a superior user experience. This is a huge paradigm shift for most writers, who are used to writing about what WE do, how WE can help you, what WE have to offer. Yeah, well, nobody cares. All the user cares about is, of course, “What’s in it for ME? What can you do for ME? How can you help ME? What do you have to offer ME?”

So, at the highest level, these “standard-bearers” must understand the importance of UXD and be well-versed in the language, methodology, and documentation that accompanies the process."    (Continued via adaptive path, Kate Rutter)    [Usability Resources]

Bill Gates worrying about Windows usability in 2003 ...

"Todd Bishop has published a 2003 e-mail from Bill Gates to some Microsoft developers. It’s basically Bill complaining about certain Windows features not working, and others being so convoluted that it’s irrational to expect a rational person to go through this hell to get an update or a piece of free software.

Read Bill’s entire e-mail here, it’s worth it.

The e-mail is fascinating for two reasons. First one is the fact that it’s such a genuine complaint, although it’s coming from Bill Gates. Had I or anyone else written the same thing, I bet there would be commenters who would proclaim us ignorant, lazy, or both. When it comes from Bill, well, it’s hard to pull that argument because he’s obviously not biased against Microsoft, he’s not lazy, and he’s not ignorant: he’s biased in favor of Microsoft, and he’s trying hard to do something with one of their products, but he cannot because - simply put - it sucks.

The other fascinating thing is that although this mail is dated 2003, things haven’t changed one bit. Microsoft’s page still makes David Lynch’s movies feel like simple, linear stories with a happy ending: it’s damn near impossible to find anything there, and if you do find it, its clearly named and placed with the intention of being impossible to find. At least I can’t find any other rational explanation.

Because of problems like this one, I’ve abandoned practically all of Microsoft’s programs except Windows itself, using simple freeware alternatives for everything I can. Every time a friend calls me and asks me what the hell is this “validation” thing, I think to myself that perhaps everyone would be better off doing the same.

Essentially, I think that this example brings forth the problem all (or most) giant companies have: they’re stuck up so far up their own ass that they, as a collective, have lost all reasoning about what’s usable and what’s unusable, how their products really function in real life, and - most importantly - what their customers really want. It makes me skeptical about Microsoft’s future, and especially its future related to the Internet, where things change so fast; they can buy all the Yahoos of the world, but I doubt it’ll help them change. If anything, it’ll just make them more confused."    (Continued via )    [Usability Resources]