Compete on Usability

A little something on the side

I talked to a number of practitioners at a usability event recently, and one theme I recognized throughout can be summed up as delivering to deadline, paying the bills, or meeting tough business goals. What it feels like, however, is Doing The Wrong Thing. That's when you know what the usability best practices are for a given situation, but you can't follow them for some reason. Maybe there's simply no budget for user testing, or perhaps a new stakeholder parachutes into your project demanding wrongheaded changes.

Generally you can't fire your client, blow off your grant committee, or tell your boss to get lost. Instead, you have to grit your teeth and get things done as best you can. At times like these, it really can help to have something on the side -- a way to exercise your skills outside of your day job. Taking an interest outside of the 9-5 workday is a key indicator of profession enthusiasm and success. Here are some of the ways usability professionals can follow their bliss outside of the office:

1. Volunteer for World Usability Day. Better move fast though, WUD 2009 is arriving on November 12.

2. Start a blog. Although Twitter has eaten up much of my blogging ideas, I still find blogging is one of the best things I ever did for my career. Sites like Posterous and Tumblr, along with smartphone clients, make it unbelievably easy to let the world know what you're thinking about.

3. Take a course outside of your comfort zone. More and more these days, employers are looking for double- or triple-treat practitioners who are as well versed in visual design and UI coding as they are with usability. It's easy and not too expensive to take night courses and expand your skillset.

4. Help design open source software. This has a much steeper learning curve than other options on the list, but it can be done. Look for a project on software that you use and care about, where the developers are eager for help. Or, see if you can figure out the open source design movement related to physical products.

What have you done to wield your usability skills beyond your typical work context? Please share in the comments.

Slideshow of Twitter tips

My partner and I presented on Twitter at the Boston Mini-UPA conference. It was a terrific experience! We filled the room, and received lots of positive feedback. After posting on Slideshare, the deck was featured on their Design homepage. Here is the presentation.

Tips from Two Tweeps: How User Experience Pros Find Value on Twitter

View more OpenOffice presentations from uxforward.

Destroying Twitter, one spam link at a time

Today I saw a compelling tweet for a free camera bag contest:

 
I clicked through, scrolled down, and I realize that my acquaintance Hybernaut was spamming me.  Here's how I had to enter the contest:

 
This is the second time I've seen a Twitter link pyramid scheme in action. I first lost my innocence when my reliable Twitter source of fun quotes suddenly posted a spammy non-quote tweet. We exchanged angry comments, but apparently, out of the account's thousand followers, I was the only one to complain.

These message strike me emotionally, by breaking down the central value premise I find in Twitter. I believe when people post messages, it's their thoughts in words, and not a corporation using them as a mouthpiece.  If I'm following AmazonMP3, of course I know a business is posting the content. But when people I've met in real life post a commercial link without context, the metaphor shear is so abrupt and jarring, I know how the recipients of the first email spam must have felt.

Imagine if most or all the people you follow on Twitter frequently entered contests this way. How could you tell when it was really them posting?  Does it matter, as long as the content behind the link is interesting?  It matters to me, but maybe I'm one in a thousand. What do you think?

Update: Twitter spam links are similar to the recent Burger King offer to get a free Whopper if you drop 10 Facebook friends. It's different in that the 10 people affected weren't sent a spam link disguised as a real person's update. Still, it's another example of marketers experimenting with incentives to change people's behavior on social networks.

Update 2: The equation changes completely for me if a Twitter friend edits the message explain the context before tweeting. I'm not sure it changes if the marketing is for a cause I approve of.

Why do web designers descend from graphic designers?

Yesterday I read The Details That Matter, an article on A List Apart about professional web design. The article itself was only semi-interesting, so I skimmed it and clicked into the comments. I like the articles on A List Apart, but I love the reader comments. Their users have diverse opinions, and they don't shy from challenging the author, or from questioning conventional Web thinking in general.

(As an aside, it's a shame the website buries all comments behind a generic link, and forces readers to page through them ten at a time. Even old-world online newspapers do a better job than this.)

One comment in particular made me stop and think:

And again web design is portrayed as the logical grandchild of graphic design. Why is that so? What makes everybody think it is like this? ... Where is the article that describes web design’s connections to engineering, industrial design, computer science, interface design, architecture and so forth?

Hm! I was disappointed no one responded to these questions, because there's plenty to chew on here. The quick answer is that web design and graphic design both are two-dimensional. Each focuses on laying out text and images in eye-grabbing, informative ways.

What web design owes

What about the parent-child relationship -- must web design be a descendant of graphic design, rather than its peer? Well, maybe it rankles pure web designers, but I see them applying many general graphic design concepts online. Online, fundamentals of grid layout, typography, color theory, and visual hierarchy are borrowed from graphic design.

I don't see the influence in the other direction. What have interactive websites done for designs in other fields? I'm not speaking to the process of design, where the complexity and rapid pace of Internet business has improved how web designers work:

... [D]esigners involved in interactive media tend to engage with clients at a higher level, manage projects with more thought, and have a more sophisticated view of their audience [than print graphic designers].

Process is one thing, but what about the actual designs?  Is the Webdings font taking hold in Hollywood?  Are the hot new graphic designers all learning their trade on MySpace?  I doubt it, except for very niche events.

Tools vs. theory

Of course, this linear descendance doesn't mean that print graphic designers will always design great websites. A good designer must know the tools that apply in her sphere. (More than half the graphic designers in the USA are women.) Just like a print designer needs to know CMYK, Pantone, and production process, a web designer must speak the language of CSS, semantic HTML and optimized web graphics. 

The key difference between print and the web, obviously, is that print is static, while the Web is dynamic. So the best Web designers always are optimizing transitions, considering pageflow and download times, and choosing among interactive techologies like Flash or AJAX.

Finally, often a print design is optimized for one type of output, like a flyer or book, but a web design may need to function on different computer platforms, or even on mobile phones and devices. A graphic designer might deliver several different design treatments for a company's stationary, fliers, signage, etc ... but the best web designers can make a single website work well on all kinds of screens, and even with screen readers for the visually impaired.

Other fields

The comment raises the influence of architecture, engineering, and industrial design. These have little more than metaphorical relevance to web design. "Information architecture," for example, is very close to library science, but very far from the folks designing bridges.

Why is this question important?

One characteristic of neophytes is they don't know what they don't know. Experts, on the other hand, can identify their influences, their strengths, and possible areas of weakness. By knowing their place in the wider information sphere, they need not reinvent concepts, and they can clearly communicate with their teams. Therefore, when you know what web design owes to graphic design, you have sharper mental tools to approach and perfect a design.

A tale of three bloggers

When I first started blogging about usability, two great bloggers with similar interests commented on my early posts and, by doing so, encourage me to keep going. I'm referring to Dr. Pete of User Effect and James Breeze of UsableWorld.

A year and a half ago, it seemed to me that we were all blogging about very similar usability topics. Now though, we've diverged a little. The three of us still blog about usability, but our interests have evolved over time. The space we're in is rich with opportunities to specialize! To deliver value to clients and employers, it's important to take advantage.

User experience = marketing ...

These days Dr. Pete is posting more about search engine optimization and marketing. These are enormously important Web topics, but somehow in my career, I haven't had to focus on them. At most jobs, like now, I create interfaces that live behind login and don't have a search engine presence. At other jobs when I've worked on more public websites, we've had other folks in charge of SEO / SEM. When I need to get current, I know where to go.

Based on data ...

Over at UsableWorld, Mr. Breeze has been writing more about eye tracking. Years ago I worked with an eye tracker, but again, it's not something I've ever focused on. In fact, until recently, I was dubious about this expensive technology's real value to usability research. But recent UsableWorld posts, plus reports from Google and elsewhere, have reintroduced me to the value of this technique.

Plus design

As for me, I've become more attuned to the role of design. Over time it's been more and more difficult to think about usability without it. After all, "without graphic design, all you have is a plan!" I've always wanted this blog to be business-oriented, and it seems to me that top tech companies differentiate on their product design process. I've been influenced by my current workplace, where developers and QA engineers regularly propose UI simplifications and challenge the graphic design.

What's your special area of focus within user experience?

More web wireframing: Balsamiq Mockups

Following up on a recent post comparing online wireframing applications, here's a look at another application. I began with particular criteria for wireframing tools:

• Share files and collaborate with remote coworkers
  
• Work from home on my Mac, and at the office on my PC
  
• Use web apps to build web apps! 

As I looked at different apps, I also found a few more features I really liked:

• Keyboard shortcuts
• Great customer care
• A cool looking interface

Keying on layout

Balsamiq Mockups, an Adobe AIR application (free to try, $79 for your own), presents shelves of widgets in a distinctive pencil-sketch style.  There's a wide array of widgets to size and add text to, but no way to draw your own shapes.  Also, shapes cannot be broken apart.

Laying them out works well and is pleasant to mess around with. The components snap into alignment with each other in a way that Microsoft Visio should imitate -- although it's not quite best of breed. Snap doesn't center to other objects, so in my mind it's not as good as the smart layout implementation in Apple's Keynote presentation software.

Keyboard shortcuts don't appear to work on my Mac.  The help says Command instead of Ctrl should work on Macs, but in Safari, the browser shortcuts rule. A few minutes of using the pulldown menus to copy and paste had me gritting my teeth in frustration. There's a one-click Duplicate icon, but still, keyboard shortcuts are the fastest solution for a productivity tool. I hope Balsamiq fixes them.

Collaborating with the tool is not as straightforward as it might be.  You can import / export file attachments and email them among teammates, and Mockups supports plugins to other collaboration systems. However, I'd prefer a simple way to give other accounts access to my work for editing directly.

More fun without the Comic

Balsamiq's getsatisfaction presence is a big plus. Getsatisfaction.com is a terrific way for companies that really care about customers to both do good and look good.  It's more usable and scannable than a message board interface, and more trustworthy that testimonial stories.  A couple minutes of browsing shows how much the company works to add features and please users.

For example, one of the tool's shortcomings is font support. The default Comic Sans font is tough to take seriously. Like others posting online, I found that my coworkers immediately noticed and criticized this unfortunate default type choice. The lead developer's struggles with font licensing, and his compromise solution, are clearly archived on Getsatisfaction, so even if you're not pleased with the "use system font" alternative, you can understand why the company chose that option.  It's an adequate fix for me.

Don't miss the full screen mode. It's non-interactive, so you can't edit, but it's great for presenting your work. Full-screen presentations online, without browser chrome, are cool features of the newest online platforms like AIR and Microsoft Silverlight.

Bottom line?

I like Balsamiq Mockups for its strong intangibles. Companies that care about customer support are rarer than they ought to be. However, the more I use these various online wireframing tools, the more I realize how important keyboard shortcuts are for doing real work. Balsamiq really needs to fix Mac shortcuts.

In addition, I can't get used to the pencil-sketch style of the wireframes. For me, boxes and gray lines say "wireframe," and an obtrusive computerized sketch style is unnecessary. This is just personal preference though -- I think other users will like the style.

I meant to also look at Rapidrabb.it in this post, but I had too much Mockups to talk about.  Next time!

P.S.  Sorry about the horrendous markup and formatting in this post. Typepad and I have some work to do together on my new template.

When design is not about problem solving

I just finished a user-centered design course with an unusual group project: redesign the office phone. It seemed easy.  Everyone thinks office phones are dumb and ugly, right?  After all, no one knows how to use features like conference call and transfer.  The phone's functionality is like a fossil record: layers of new buttons alongside old buttons, all bolted together uneasily onto a chunk of gray plastic.

Although the class was about applying user-centered methodology, the users we interviewed were resigned to the current phone.  As a result, our first prototype fulfilled the UCD requirements, but it was just as dull as the current product. So our professor pushed us to come up with something more creative than the incremental changes suggested by user research. 

The process reminded me of a rant about design I read recently.  I'd always felt comfortable with the definition of design being "solving problems."  Sometimes, though, the only real issue is an aesthetic problem, and the only user feedback is apathy. So what? You can still take a new product to market and surprise and delight customers with great design.

My team's final prototype was a round, glowing disk called the Orange Moon phone.  I think it turned out well, though it's not likely to get picked up by Nortel anytime soon. The corporate IT departments that buy these phones are not known for brave design choices.  Perhaps your next office phone will be beige instead of gray -- that's progress for you.

For some data about trends in tech devices, all five project groups in class incorporated these technologies:

• Biometrics
• Bluetooth headsets
• Touchscreens

And one or more added these:

• Handwriting recognition
• Videoconferencing
• Wearable computing

The wrong trend in design

Everywhere you look these days, experts are urging designers to get it wrong! Early design iteration has always been a good practice in software, but with collaborative tools improving, and processes decentralizing, the idea is spreading to the Web and beyond.

Rapid prototyping has caught on in fields beyond software and Web publishing. Not long ago, Detroit car manufacturers insisted on high-fidelity clay models to prototype early versions of new car designs.  Today everyone from automakers to zookeepers uses low-fidelity methods to generate and evaluate multiple prototypes quickly.

Getting the design wrong is promoted most by current entrepreneurial thinking.  When you try several ideas quickly, you have a better chance of success overall.  It's a great trend because in design, the constant temptation is to polish the first solid concept, rather than generate fresh ideas until something great results.  Designers must iterate to get past the first burst of predictable ideas, and stretch their brains around creative solutions.  For example, inventor James Dyson built over five thousand prototypes before finalizing his market-changing vacuum cleaner design.

Finally, designers are beginning to embrace failure. Failing to succeed was a theme at SXSW 2008. In July, the counterintuitive Failcamp celebrated design disasters.

Despite inspirational messages, I've seen less of this trend in usability.  It's still the practice of incremental perfectionism. As such, usability risks being left behind our launch-and-learn era of quick failure.

How to make touchscreen voting trustworthy

Flickr photo by Caitlin Anna

Touchscreen voting errors and fraud are hot topics again in the USA. For example, in the left-wing blog DailyKos, voters' complaints that the machine switched their votes to the other party right before their eyes are given promient, panic-button status.  There's plenty of vote fraud in American history, though visibly changing someone's vote would be a silly way to commit it. Rarely do online blog entries contain any visuals, so it's difficult to know what exactly happened unless your were there.  It's enough to conclude that the machines seem untrustworthy and did not meet users' expectations.

Meanwhile there's an electronic voting machine on the cover of Time, with an article that blames confusion on my least favorite usability scapegoat, "just plain human error." The magazine details a so-called human error scenario here:

"A woman walked into a polling place in Peoria, Ill. last week and proceeded to use one of the new electronic voting machines set up for early voting. She logged on, went through each contest and seemed to be making her choices. After reviewing each race, the machine checked to see if she was satisfied with her selections and wanted to move on. Each time, she pressed YES, and the machine progressed to the next race. When she was done, a waving American flag appeared on the screen, indicating that her votes had been cast and recorded.

"But there was a problem. The woman had not made any choices at all. She had only browsed. Now when she told the election judges she was ready to do it again--but this time actually vote--they told her it was too late. Pressing the last button, they said, is like dropping your ballot in an old-fashioned ballot box. There's no getting it back."

How the heck is this "human error?"  The human knew exactly what she was doing. I know from experience some users of online applications like to first run through a workflow in a test mode, making quick default choices to get to the results.  Then they go back, or hit Undo, and make real, thoughful choices with a better understanding of the overall process.

Last year I wrote that touchscreen voting manufacturers need to keep their interface familiar and simple, because they're being held to a higher standard than mechanical voting machines. In retrospect, I was too kind to Diebold, ES&S, and other electronic voting companies. When searching on your company name brings up link after link calling your products into question, something's very wrong. 

I don't review interfaces I can't use myself, but if I worked at one of these companies, I'd make sure we were showing voters the following:

Simple screen layouts. Some of the screenshots I've seen have way too much information laid out in two dimensions. Keep things simple in a single list.

Confirmation views and undo opportunities. These certainly would have helped the example voter above.

Physical artifacts. At a minimum, the machines should spit out a receipt with a printed list of each vote and an easily scannable bar code for recounts.

In addition, big physical buttons as part of the interface are a nice idea. There's no reason every function has to be touchscreen. Perhaps pushing a big red button will seem more real and final to voters than if it were on screen.

Update: Visit the Touch Usability blog for great coverage of voting machine usability problems.

Interviewing usability job candidates

I received a nice email from a colleague that a previous post, on interviewing for a usability job, had helped her interview a prospect. That post was written for job seekers, so the email prompted me to post from the other side of the table. Here's what to think about when you're conducting an interview.

Have they tried out the product, or researched the organization? If your website or interface is publically available, prospects ought to have tried it out.  If it's not, they at least should have found out all they can about your company. This question is my version of the white socks test: it's a easy way to quickly separate out the real contenders.

Look for broad skills.  User experience is a developing and expanding field, touching on design, writing, marketing, QA, and customer support.  Your job description might not call for knowledge of one of these topics, but since a tech company's needs change all the time, it's a plus when candidates show evidence of their adaptability.

Experience in multiple domains also has value. Here, look for a T-shaped resume -- broad skills across the top, with deep knowledge of at least one specific domain. Research shows that teams with diverse experiences solve problems optimally.

Professional credentials count. Top candidates have more than great job experience.  They'll have presented at CHI or UPA, or they'll show you published articles in journals or magazines, or they'll have earned a degree in the field. Prospects with these credentials keep up with their peers and stay aware of the latest relevant research. Their knowledge of theory helps them anticipate issues before they happen.

Ask for cheerleading and negotiation examples.  Whether you work with consulting clients or with an in-house development team, usability work depends on persuading folks to do things your way.  This is a great opportunity for prospects to impress you with specific stories of how their communication skills carried the day. If they can't convince you of their skill, how will they win over people at work?

Can you imagine working with this person?  When evaluating coworkers, people tend to find social skills are more important than job skills.  But a job interview is an artificial situation, so awkwardness abounds.  At my company we make a point of taking candidates to lunch and just chatting with them.