Tag Archives: interaction

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!

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.