usability – Boon Yew Chew

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.

iPhone usability

Create with Context did a study on iphone usability by “regular” users, new users, and non-users. There were some interesting things I observed from the presentation:

touchscreen interfaces really benefit from good feedback and good button placement
visual trims like shadows, bevels, icon quality and transparency can help communicate affordance
smartphones can get overly complicated due to inconsistencies like modes
iphones use good metaphors (natural-feel scrolling) but it can be implemented in a way that confuses people
you just can’t assume anything about users, sometimes

Take a look at the presentation below:

How people really use the iPhone

Usability vs. Innovation? Stop already.

I was attending a UPA talk yesterday, and although I came in toward the end of the session, managed to catch a glimpse of what was about to turn into a flame war about how companies aren’t really innovating to their fullest potential. The speaker also apparently implied that usability is becoming less effective a tool in making great innovation happen, to which some people clearly disagreed.

It’s interesting to note that Martyn Perks has mentioned these things before, in a similar way a few years ago, also at another UPA event, so it seems he’s making a name for himself on this.

I’m setting aside the obvious flame baits here, because innovation and usability can too often be defined in ways that mean lots of things depending on what you’re talking about. Maybe what Perks was referring to reads something along the lines of this research article, which evaluates how (occasionally rigorous or ‘standardized’) usability work can hinder the creative progression that may be essential to produce effective innovation (whatever that innovation means).

I feel this comparison is partly pointless already, but I am summarizing my reasons as to why I feel this is so.

1. inevitably, all solutions are aimed at the long term and the wider good

Cast the net, aim for the greater good – let’s make both the usability and innovation folks happy. Let’s make them celebrate why they believe usability and innovation are so deeply connected to one another, it would be ridiculous to separate them – even if there are differences between the two.

2. don’t be afraid to use the P word

Politics are an obvious reason why we often do any innovating or usabilit-izing(?), or not. It may not have to be the case of the-bad-boss, since even small groups at peer level suffer from organizational behaviour influences. One case study I learnt this week revealed how a information architecture project failed because some people were afraid they would lose their jobs to an effectively redesigned website. This is one reason why I don’t think we’ll be seeing robots more than we’ll be seeing secretaries over the next 100 years (secretaries always do a better job).

3. many different people are good. many different people are bad.

Information architects. Brand strategists. Marketers. Usability testers. Users. Organizational psychologists. How many terms do we need for people who get paid to solve “new” problems for old and clueless people who can’t understand it anyway? And it seems that everyone has a specific trait, formed quite commonly by a shared interest in being really creative, solving real problems, and making real users happy. So why is there such an internal confusion? Let’s be nice to one another, since the future is inevitably ours since old people die anyway, and the clueless move on.

4. So what if the word usability and innovation has been overused?

Everyone knows what it sort of means, just work around it. We’ve beaten this to death.

I’ll do my best to attend the next and final UPA talk in London before 2009 comes around. Hopefully with less flame baits.

My 2 hours at Serco Usability

We had a field trip to Serco Usability Labs today. We were hosted by Andrew Swartz, who was very friendly and helpful in talking to us about the company and giving us a brief overview of the lab and even getting us involved in some usability activities.

It was great that they brought out a whole table full of snacks – grapes, corn chips, mini pretzels, twinkies,… the works. We were sheepishly holding ourselves back while Andrew was talking us through the slides, but we had our fill during the minute break though.

We didn’t get to visit the offices, which were located upstairs. We hung around the reception area and were brought to one of the testing labs, which is quite a comfy room with a large TV screen and a computer inside. The place was set up well for observation, with a huge glass window-mirror to the observation room.

This lab was a lot more customer-facing than the BT lab I visited a few years back. I just remember walking through a series of store rooms in a building in Adastral Park, before I got to the nicely decorated BT usability labs. The Serco one was conveniently located just after the reception room past a set of doors.

Although we were there for over 2 hours, it didn’t feel all that long. I was surprised at how fast time passed, and it could’ve been the fault of the snacks but Andrew did a really good job of grabbing our interest and creating some good interactions in the room.

We got a feel of how it’s like to do a usability test when a few of us tried walking through introductions for users who come into the labs. I volunteered to facilitate one of the sessions with a ‘fake’ user, who was one of the Serco staff, and it went really well and we had good things to talk about. My classmates heard me say “this sucks” from the observation room, which is really funny. I felt like I was being observed more than playing the part of the observer (of the user).

One key thing that was repeated a lot was to avoid our tendency to help the user during the think-aloud process, which I thought was a valid point to make, because the user does seem like they need help a lot sometimes. But facilitation requires a kind of real-time observation and curiousity, and sort of being in two places at once – an observer as well as a host.

If this is a taste of what the usability industry is like, then I am sold. I absolutely love interacting with users and learning how they make use of systems, and being part of the process of providing solutions that can help both companies and users build better products.

New Flickr Homepage

Labdien!

I love the new Flickr homepage redesign. They’ve made it more easy to do common things on one page, instead of having to move about different pages.

Overall, the original page hasn’t lost its flame. It still shows your latest photos, photos from your contacts, and photos from other people. But it’s been upgraded to provide activity filtering (via the activity page), preferential settings for contact photos displayed, most recent photos from groups (wasn’t there before), a ‘reload’ feature for explore, and bits of other interesting things, like a mini stats graph right above your latest photos (which could well be a ploy to get non-pro users to sign up for a pro account).

The new homepage feels a lot more dynamic too, with updates from the Flickr blog and tips giving you new feeds from time to time. I like how they didn’t displace things too much – the photos are on one side and the text activity (Flickr blog and tips) on another side. And they still maintained the international greeting at the top of the page, so I can continue learning how to greet people in different languages (not that I can remember them all).

The tips aren’t simple help advice that bore advanced users, either. One tip I just read informed me about how Flickr gives away free pro accounts to individuals from specific charity groups. Nifty! It’s a great way to explore the site’s diversity, and I’ll commend Flickr on this for the user experience bit. Tips are relevant, useful, timely ways to explore Flickr in new ways.

Flickr is sticking to the overall feel of its site, not by adding new core features, but by making existing features more accessible, therefore more ‘useful’. Things like the stats feature, flickr blog, tips, activities, group and contacts photos, are all central to the whole Flickr experience, and they made a good decision to make improvements to access those things.

For example, with the new ‘recent activity’ link at the top of your photos, you can easily see the latest “conversation” threads for comments around your photos, all at one glance. It’s quick, partly because of the AJAX work they’ve used, but it’s a good use of it here.

The overall impression that I got was that Flickr is still on the ball when it comes to user experience. I signed up many months ago for a pro account and I’ve not been dissapointed. I do know that the original founders have left Yahoo recently, but the Flickr team still ‘gets it’ and I’m looking forward to more Flickr goodness in the future.

Check out the screencast.

(this is a expanded copy of an article I posted on my personal homepage)

The New Whitehouse.gov

Change has come to America… and to the Whitehouse website too. It’s been, er, Web 2.0ized. Clean, frugal lines, punchy and concise content, navigatable – I like it. And of course, it has a blog. If this was a branding exercise, it’d definitely be on the ball (or “spot on”, as the Brits like to say).

Interestingly, the “main” navigation isn’t along sidebars, but at the top menu bar and bottom footer – keeping the body fairly open for content – divided mostly into a 3-column layout or 2-column layout (with a right sidebar). Even content on the whitehouse blog is kept terse. The first post gets an average readability score of 11.3, which is slightly above what a teenager would be comfortable reading. Firefox showed up multiple RSS feeds, which was a bit confusing, but the blog does have an RSS feed.

Comments are closed for now, but it would be interesting to see how the site will evolve.

Accessibility could be improved, I guess. There’s a link for “Accessibility” in super tiny font at the bottom. This opens a page that explains the government’s stand on accessibility, but it doesn’t have the common characteristics of a page designed for accessibility (large fonts, condensed text).

Navigational fonts could be a little bigger, at the bottom.