Category Archives: blog

UX is overwhelming

I am drowning in a sea of stuff! Is it me, or is there just too much information out there about UxD, IxD, IA, human factors, etc. I haven’t even done my first proper wireframe sketch. Maybe I just need to back off for awhile and give myself some tiny projects to focus on, until I get the hang of the tricks of the trade – aka. sketching, prototyping, powerpoint presenting, design, etc.

The more stuff I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know, the more paralyzed I feel about doing design. It’s worse than having writer’s block. It’s like claiming to know something I absolutely have no clue about, or having all that information in the head and not being able to make sense of it.

I’m learning though. Like, I found post-it notes to be really useful in coming up with rich pictures (something we learnt in Organizational Informatics) and other relational diagrams. I recently used them to produce a diagram describing the various roles, artefacts and relationships at the London Underground. This was produced from textual descriptions of the relationships, but it’s easier to see it visually.

I’m also in the process of downloading tons of podcasts, some of which I can never recall later, but it gives me comfort knowing that it’s there and and I know what Gerry Gaffney sounds like, and what he does, and the same goes for Jared Spool.

I’ve also been twitter-ing a lot, and following the messages posted by some relatively active UX folks. the amount of traffic and information that I get from that is also, overwhelming. I tell myself that being in the conversation pays off, because it somehow comes back to you. Even though I have little understanding of whether ‘leading’ and ‘line-height’ can be used interchangeably, I’m sure it’ll come useful in the future. Note to self: finish the “Stop stealing sheep” book.

And talk about BOOKS! There are so many books to read. I’m now halfway through Buxton’s Sketching book (design), Becker’s Tricks book (sociology/anthropology), and Fogg’s Persuasive Tech book. Not to mention Cooper’s Inmates book which I take on the tube whenever I go to Ikea.

I hope this is just a phase, and that it’ll pass. For now, I may be a subject for sensemaking.

ACM’s Interactions magazine – Jan/Feb ’09 online

ACM publishes a fantastic journal on human-computer interaction. They’ve made the Jan/Feb ’09 edition publicly available online.

Interesting article titles I skimmed from the “Contents” page:

  • Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities
  • 90 Mobiles in 90 Days: A Celebration of Ideas for Mobile User Experience
  • The Washing Machine That Ate My Sari—Mistakes in Cross-Cultural Design
  • Design Versus Innovation: The Cranbrook / IIT Debate
  • Can “Wow” Be a Design Goal?
  • The Value of Visual Design in Software Development
  • What is Interaction? Are There Different Types?

Link source from experientia.

Gravity-Operated Interface: Muji Multi-Functional Clock

Muji Multi-clock novel interface

I bought this multi-functional clock from Muji which features a fantastic gravity-operated design. You simply rotate the device the “Feature”-way-up to activate that mode. As you can see, it’s currently on Calendar mode. I rotate clockwise to get to the “Alarm” mode.

Very simple operation. A “beep” signals that the mode has changed. The settings are done via two buttons, located behind the device.

It’s price? £6.80.

With batteries included.

It did, however, spell “calendar” wrongly. A “calender” apparently means something else.

Muji Multi-clock simple interactions

UPA-UK event: Credit Crunch

I attended the credit crunch event organized by UPA last week, and Gerred Blyth gave a brief presentation about the recession in general and opened the floor to another speaker (I can’t remember who) who spoke from his experience in previous recesssion.

Gerred kinda went through a list of industries which were benefiting from the recession and industries which were clearly losing out. Though not entirely revelational, it was good to get us started thinking about the topic.

Recession is bad news for:

  • Housing
  • Financial
  • Financial
  • Automotive
  • Retail (there are exceptions, as you will see below)
  • Advertising Expenditure
  • Venture Capital

Good news for:

  • Poundland, Morrisons
  • UK tourism (£ is cheap)
  • Do-it-yourself
  • accountancy/law
  • adult industry (not sure about this one)
  • church?
  • online retail (big one here)
  • mass merchandising (related to online retail)
  • beauty
  • home and garden (people staying at home?)
  • business software services
  • online advertising

It seems the message seems to be that online is good, and that traditional biz is bad. But both good and bad reports are coming from usability professionals regarding the recession. Perhaps it may be that less projects are being awarded these days. Who knows.

The point of it is that the recession is apparently here, and so in order to “make” it relevant to us, we broke into three teams to brainstorm ideas about how to combat the recession. The teams consisted of:

  • agencies
  • in-house
  • freelancers/individuals

Since my classmate and I were not part of any group, we decided to go into one we thought we’d best fit in – individuals. Ms. Be facilitated our session well as we brainstormed all the different ways in order to stay relevant in the business.

Of all the different things we shared, portfolios seemed to come up quite a lot, as well as networking. Staying professional and being on time was another. Another one you’d think would be difficult to do during a recession also appeared – smiling. I guess everyone around the table was maintaining a postitive attitude, a good reminder that we’re all human.

The speaker whose name I can’t remember said that if you’re good, you’ll get hired eventually if you do get fired. So, what about the not so good ones? Well, that will probably lead to other questions.

Some people mentioned that companies do hire graduates, for whatever that’s worth. Then I heard a blurb that it’s not easy for graduates to get freelance jobs. Either way, I think the signal is that it’s not impossible, but it’ll take some work.

However, I kept thinking to myself – there must be something we’re missing. People are still spending money, just in different ways. And if it’s not folks here in the UK, then there are people who are outside the UK spending that money.

And I even suppose some work wouldn’t even require money. Favors, perhaps. Who knows. I’d be interested to hear success stories.

As for me, I think knowing yourself is key to getting the job you want. I don’t think all jobs are made alike – so there’s no real competition here, and it’s always good to know what you want anyway.

This just scares me

…many students from HCI programs don’t emerge well trained in experimental design, statistics, methods for consumer research, content analysis, or ethnography. These gaps in their research skills limit them when it comes to opportunities in other influential business roles, including promotions beyond the usability function.

– Lynn Cherny, Interactions 2007

This just scares me.

This quote, the final paragraph of the article, is the proper frame of context:

We can’t just talk about the importance of good design. If we don’t create good design, user experience and product innovation won’t be coming from us, but from someone on the engineering team. And we’ll be lucky to be asked to evaluate it.

– Lynn Cherny, Interactions 2007

Beyond the browser: Usability in Mobile Interaction

I was at a UXCorner meeting last night, and it was organized by the kind folks at UXMedia. They had some interesting speakers come share their experiences about mobile user experience.

Mobile Design

One of the speakers, Anthony Ribot, gave some insightful bits about user experience from a mobile perspective. Maybe it’s the fact that I haven’t spent that much work on developing real-world mobile applications – but he’s right in saying it’s really competitive to be in this space.

“A single early failure = non-returning user”

… it said on one of his slides. That’s enough to put shivers down a lot of developer’s spines.

“data snacking”

was another term he mentioned, referring to a common european trend for users to log-in to check for new messages, posts, news, updates. “simple but repetitive”.

Another 2 tips for mobile developers/designers:

  • miniaturization != mobilization
  • design reward-based exploration (he mentions Opera Mini a lot here) – using convenient keys to allow for more direct access (hotkey-like, almost) to useful functionality (e.g. tree menu traversal)

The slides are here.

UX in London vs. US

I was chatting with Scott Weiss from Human Factors International, who was also one of the speakers, about his experience between the UK and US user experience industries – which one did he think was more “ahead of the game”. To my surprise, he seemed to think that UK has it together a little more than in the US. And I think he may have been referring to how tons of companies still aren’t very into this kind of stuff, not counting most of the major cities.

In fact, speaking to one of the folks from UXmedia, I didn’t realize that they’re not based in London, although they do a lot of work in the city. The Southampton-based agency is certainly getting more active in London, but I was humbly surprised to find so many small but great agencies doing this kind of stuff around the country.

2009 – a UX year?

This is one of three UX events that area already taking place the first month of the year. Can’t wait to see what’s in store for the rest!

UCLIC Term 1 is almost over – Lessons Learnt

I’ve learnt a lot over term one, but that has also left me with a lot of questions.

Here are some general things that I can recall at the top of my head (it’s been a long week)…

  • Bringing practice and academia together isn’t easy and can lead to contrived situations where we have to imagine what it’s like to do things in the corporate world
  • There are over 100 usability evaluation methods, and I’m assuming these are mostly from the HCI research community – I don’t think all of them are applied in the working world
  • A solid grounding in theory does help a lot in practice, but maybe too much theory isn’t good
  • There’s a lot of emphasis on the UK HCI-ergonomics industries, but what about abroad? I believe there’s a sizable community in Asia (Hong Kong, India, etc.), and I don’t feel the impact of the US-based UX industry here in the UK.
  • It’s always important to attend practice seminars, where people from industry give talks and students get to engage in exercises that illustrate take away lessons (e.g. perform costing for a project proposal)
  • Joining the UPA as a student member and attending their events have been beneficial and insightful for me

Growing pains

Someone once said that the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know – and I think that’s really true. There’s so much stuff to learn and it’s impossible to cover it all within a span of one year. And at the same time, good usability doesn’t come instantly and builds on good practice and experience (and hence experienced usability practioners get paid much more).

I regret not spending enough time to read. It’s one of the things on my priority list for the holidays, and I need to cover at least 10 books back to back, really fast – both for the course and for my usability interest. I put my name down for the London UX bookclub, and I’m hoping to join the inaugural meeting slated for February ’09.

Usability isn’t always = to innovation

Taking stock of my experiences over the last few months, I explicitly remember how Cooper’s “About Face 3” was really the turning point for me. But even before that when I was starting out with BT 3 years ago, there was a lot of hype and talk about innovation (not just in BT, but everywhere).

For some reason, I had considered usability and innovation somewhat synonymous, and I realize it’s not always the case. There have been times where our lecturers made it clear to us that innovation, while commercially beneficial, isn’t always a direct application of HCI or ergonomics.

And I think this is what makes “the industry” look quite chaotic at times, because there are so many people coming at this from so many different places. There’s never ‘one right answer’, and as usability/ux/hci/ergonomics people, we’re always having to say, ‘it depends‘.

And I think that UCLIC has done the right thing to emphasize on the learning process, or something they call “reflection” (which Kevin Cheng also observed about UCLIC about a few years ago, albeit somewhat negatively).

More to come…

I’m not quite done with the term just yet, lest I decide to pack my bags and go for a long holiday. Two papers are due January, and there’s tons to catching up to do. One of the papers involve evaluating usability evaluation methods (yes, evaluation methods that get evaluated) in measuring visitors’ experiences of a Zoo website, which I think will be fun.

Usability gripes with Firefox’s download feature

Double-clicking on my item on the ‘download’ bar on Mozilla Firefox forced the download to ‘pause’. Why did it do that? What made it so obvious to include such a feature? Was it obvious to Firefox users that double-clicking on the status bar most likely implies the download to pause?

For me, this discovery came as an accident. I had no idea that I had activated the pause feature by accidentally double-clicking the item I was downloading. I didn’t intend to pause the downloading. In fact, I couldn’t think of any reason why anyone would want to pause a download… unless I knew that pausing a download would provide some benefits, which I can only assume are:

  • I have very little space left so I have to pause the download, clear up and organize my hard disk, and then resume it again later
  • My internet bandwidth is so slow that I want to prioritize my downloads
  • My download just stalled, and I think that by pausing it, and resuming it – it will send network packets to the server to ‘remind’ it, so that it will hopefully resume my download

These assumptions aren’t commonly made by non-technical users. But then, this is an ubiquitous web browser – shouldn’t it appeal to non-technical people as well?

Also, notice how small the pause button and the delete buttons are? How accurate does your mouse pointer have to be? What if you have a really small monitor? What if you have a really dirty non-optical mouse? What if you’re using a touchpad?

And why is the pause button so close to the delete button? What if you accidentally hit the delete button instead of the pause? Firefox doesn’t ask you for confirmation – which may lead users to accidentally cancel a download, although there are many examples of annoying confirmation dialog boxes out there already.

Does it sound reasonable to make sure that users don’t cancel a download accidentally? How often does that happen? Would it better to have the download button placed in a different way?

I’m currently using Firefox 3.0.4, which is currently the latest version at this point I’m writing.

YouTube interface redesigned

YouTube introduces widescreen format and a larger viewing space

After the changes in Gmail a few days ago, I noticed a similar ad hoc behavior with YouTube today. And I meant ad hoc as in while I was using the website it was still using the old interface, and then after I clicked on a few pages, the layout changed instantly.

Witnessing an interface change before your eyes

The change is pretty evident – videos are now shown in wide-screen format and are noticably larger than before. It’s confirmed on the YouTube blog, and it may be that they are slowly rolling it out to certain people at a time since I only noticed the change a few minutes ago. I recall someone saying that Gmail themes had a same effect – some people noticed the new themes feature while others didn’t, and it was because Google was rolling them out to users in phases (presumably).

A more ‘immersive’ YouTube?

I actually like the wide-screen format and the larger view, because the videos do look and feel bigger. Despite its popularity and ubiquity, YouTube’s overall experience isn’t all that ‘immersive’ (Vimeo comes to mind). I think with the new format, it’s a step closer in that direction.

Judging from the comments from the blog post, not all users are happy with it, though. Some users prefer the screen to adapt to the original video size – which means some pages may look different than others. It’s important to note that YouTube doesn’t stretch uploaded videos, but pads the borders with black. This means that the majority of videos that use the 4:3 format will have black rectangles on the left and right.

Interestingly, though – the thumbnails are cropped to fit the whole area. So 4:3 videos will have the top and bottom parts clipped in the thumbnail (which sort of makes sense, since keeping the black rectangles might make it look ugly).

The clipping thing wasn’t very obvious to me as I was in the middle of trying to look for cooking videos. If my goal ultimately is to watch videos, a larger view of the video gives me more of what I want. I could care less about videos being cropped or ratios, unless it negatively impacted my viewing.

Introducing interface changes as a usability topic

This brings me back to the usability aspect of websites – this kind of change is a fairly straightforward one. Not much else has changed, but even then – having a wider, larger player has a dramatic impact on the way users experience the site.

Also, I don’t know if there were any formal studies done on the design of the new layout and screen. It almost seems as if this was a simple case of understanding what users want and trying to give users the kind of experience they prefer.

And often times, this is the case with websites, especially ones with any element of social networking. Users grow with the site. As initial users, who were novices at first, turn into regular/intermediate users – their goals also ‘evolve’. And thus, the site has to adapt to the changing needs of the community.

This is particularly difficult for any site that needs to appeal to a wide spectrum of users. Recent interfaces changes in Flickr (video in Flickr) and Facebook (major facelift) drew a lot of criticism as much as it did praise.

Who’s responsible?

Does this fall under the responsibility of interaction designers and usability practitioners, whose goal is to place users before all things, to address the often conflicting reactions of real users when faced with upgraded layouts and new features?

It would be interesting to see find out how the industry deals with this sort of ‘user politics’ when it comes to the increasingly ubiquitous use of technology.