Compete on Usability

Your keyboard and mouse are going away. Will usability go with them?

I had one of those blogosphere epiphanies last night, where different people opining about different stuff all came together for me.  It started with the new report I have to read from Bill Buxton's Microsoft research group about what computing interfaces will be like in 2020.

Add recent posts from Oz about eye tracking replacing mice, combined with other notes about the decline in personal computing, and even some near sci-fi news about operating computers with brainwaves, and the trend crystallizes.

Hey, take a good look at your computer, and compare it to machines you used ten years ago.  CRT monitors are mostly gone. Disk drives and ports have changed, shrank, and started to disappear in favor of wireless.  The oldest parts of your PC are the forty-five year old mouse and of course the two-hundred year old keyboard.  These venerable peripherals are on the way out now.

When I entered the workforce, people were beginning to accept as inevitable that everyone would change jobs many times in their lifetimes.  I think the next great trend will be people in technology changing careers completely, several times in a lifetime. If within twenty years everyone is communicating with everyday devices by touch, eye tracking, or brainwaves, the concept of an interface will be radically different.  Usability as we know it today could become obsolete.

Even within ten years, as people use next-gen iPhones and Google Android devices to accomplish everything they once had to sit and type to do, usability professionals can expect many of their skills to become dated.

We can be reasonably confident that cognitive psychology will remain relevant, at least, since ten, twenty, or a hundred years are not enough to evolve us into bigger brains.  But think again -- with chips in our brains enhancing working memory, grabbing any needed information instantly from a ubiquitous Net, and performing complex calculations trivially, many of the tasks we need a computer interface for today will become easy as thought. Humans will not have the same cognitive limitations we're used to working within.

I used to think all this stuff was either science fiction, or maybe for future generations to worry about. But I think everything in this post will be happening in my lifetime.  And I wonder what I'll be doing for work as a result.  Check out those links and let me know what you think.

SXSWi observations

 

I returned from South by Southwest today, impressed by the good vibrations I'm still feeling from a great conference. A number of themes kept coming up:

1.  Community and social networking

The image in this post is from one of the better sessions I attended, by Derek Powazek. In Crowdsourcing for Creatives, he cautioned clueless large companies and "community builders," he referenced GM's satirized Tahoe online ad contest.  His lessons were:

• Get the audience right. Invitations should have gone only to GM owners, not the whole web.
• Don't put users in a very small box or they'll rebel. GM only allowed captioning and resequencing of content.
• Don't be greedy with your content. Allow people to import their own graphics, collaborate, and share what they create.
• Don't be selfish. Believe it or not, GM didn't even allow users to sign their creations!

While there were other good lesson to be had, every other session, it seemed, had social networking in the title.  That felt faddish to me.

2.  Neuroplasticity

Not a term you often hear, but it came up a few times in Austin.  Broad interests and diverse experiences will make you smarter and age better. A limber brain, of course, also relates to creativity and problem solving.

3.  I'm a Mac

In the businesses I've worked for, you see ten PCs for every Mac. At SXSW, the ratio was reversed.  Blackberry was doing a little better, but there still was a great preponderance of iPhones among the smartphone-wielding masses.

 

You can see more of my random SXSW photos here.

making The Switch: The ineffable user experience

Ouch. It's been awhile since I blogged! 

I can weigh the pros and cons of my new MacBook, but when I add them up, 2 + 2 = 5.  There's something hard to quantify about the way the whole system works together, predictably and well.  I guess with Wintel boxes, I tend to assume that commonplace interactions will not go well the first time.  Whether it's hooking up a new printer, installing a new application, or even plugging in a new mouse, I don't expect it to work without plenty of tweaking and friction.  Most likely this relates to the enormously broad array of legacy hardware and software that Windows must be compatible with.

I once got in a conversation with a former Microsoft employee about the long turnaround time on bugfixes for Office.  He gave me a number of good reasons, including the many third-party add-ons the product supports, and the many platforms it runs on. Nevertheless, I instantly had to bite my tongue to keep from interrupting that I simply didn't care about any of those features. Clearly near-universal compatibility is important to Microsoft, but not to me, and probably not to any individual user. I wanted to respond that Microsoft needed to meet my individual needs faster, or I wouldn't want to stick around. Our different value systems meant we could barely understand each other's point.

Macs on OSX are unencumbered by decades of legacy code and hardware, and if I had to guess, that makes everything run just a little smoother.  That's good enough for me.

making The Switch: My MacBook user experience

I had several good reasons for purchasing a MacBook but, anticipating my new laptop's arrival, I still was nervous about switching.  About a month later, it's been a positive overall experience for me.  I hardly miss my old PC at all.

The positives

Great keyboard and trackpad. The keys are springy and let me type fast. The touch pad responds better than other pointing devices I've used in the past.  It's hard to describe, but a combination of the touch surface and the way it responds to fast and slow motions, somehow make it better.

It sleeps and wakes up intuitively.  I've dealt with multiple laptops and desktops where the sleep or hibernate commands don't work the way you set them in Windows.  It's common for machines to ship straight from the vendor with memory-resident software that messes up power saving.  Not so with this MacBook!  Close the lid and it sleeps immediately.  Open the lid and it comes back on almost instantly.  It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Lots of applications open?  No problem.  Mac OSX is designed to handle multiple open applications without cluttering up the interface.  I find that when the Windows XP Taskbar has more than four or five applications, all the rectangles and ellipsis text look crowded and bug me.  The OSX Dock holds many applications by icon, marking them subtly and without lots of cut-off text.

Quicksilver. Although I like the Dock, I don't use it to launch applications.  On the advice of coworkers, I downloaded the freeware Quicksilver launcher. Quicksilver opens with a key combination, and then typing only a few more letters launches an application.  It has many more functions, but I'm content with the fast, no-pointer-required application launching for now.

The negatives

My slippery, dirty case.  The matte surface of the black MacBook is quite slippery, almost like the inside of a nonstick pan. I've come close to dropping it more than once. Other times, I caught myself holding on so tightly that the case was flexing.  At length, I decided it's only safe to pick it up with two hands.

After a month, my laptop has picked up several noticeable fingerprint marks. Cleaning them safely is not straightforward, because Mac community resources are flatly contradictory on the best way to clean the case.  Is an isopropyl alcohol solution fine, or will it strip off your finish?  Does Apple's iKlear polish work on black MacBooks, or not?  My favorite comment from this post was that the dangerous wood fibers found in paper towels will scar your case like sandpaper. Hmm.

Keyboard layout.  The Command buttons for keyboard shortcuts are crowded close to the spacebar, unlike PCs, which puts the Ctrl button at either edge.  On my Wintel laptop, for keyboard shortcuts, I can easily reach the Ctrl key with my pinky finger and hit a letter key with my index finger. That's not possible with the Command keys on this keyboard layout.

I also miss the PC Delete key (aka "delete forwards").  It's difficult to remember (and reach for) Fn+delete for that.

It's a two (or three) mouse button world.  Come on, Apple. Is there any reason left not to ship your computers with two buttons for the trackpad?  After all, if you plug in a two-button mouse, it will work.  You even sell two button mice. We're years past the point when even diehard Mac fans could argues that Command-Control-Shift-clicking is a good idea.

On my PC the scrollwheel is clickable as a third mouse button, and I use it to open a link in a new Firefox tab. So, I really feel two buttons behind.

The Finder is so missing.  Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but since I know the file system is based on a hierarchy of folders, widgets layered on top of that make it more difficult to orient myself and save things where I want them.

In the Mac OSX Leopard screenshot to the right, there's a little Home row of breadcrumbs that mimics the UI I've seen in iTunes. However, that was turned off by default on my Macbook.

The button to create a new folder is also needlessly buried.  I guess I'll have to learn the keyboard shortcut for that one.

And the final score ...

I very much like the MacBook overall, but for reasons beyond all these pro and cons.  II'll need one more blog post to expound on those reasons.

making The Switch: Upgrade choices

Today was Steve Jobs's annual MacWorld conference keynote, a perfect opportunity to post about my experience with my new MacBook.  Last year I needed to upgrade my old Dell, but I really wasn't interested in "upgrading" to Windows Vista. The irritating security warnings I've read about, with a very poor signal-to-noise ratio, make me believe that Microsoft has lost any empathy for real end users. Still, I was resigned to limp along for as long as possible on Windows XP before grudgingly transitioning.

Instead, a confluence of events convinced me to take the Mac plunge. Reports of the diminished cost difference between PCs and Macs and Apple's growth in market share helped me think different, but not nearly as much as the examples set by my peers. My wife is a teacher, so it's not surprising she's a longtime Mac user. The tipping point came when I started my new job, however. I was impressed to find the most thoughtful engineers preferred not Linux boxes, and certainly not Wintel devices, but Macs.   

In the end, and say what you will about Apple's marketing hype, it's clear they are among the leading companies in the world who have chosen to compete on user experience. I want to support a company whose values are so closely aligned with my own.

So at the beginning of December, for my birthday, I purchased a black MacBook.  (I wanted the sophisticated black shell no matter what, but since my wife already owned a white MacBook, it was practical to get the different color for myself.)  This post is becoming a little long, so I'll follow up soon with my sense of whether the product has fulfilled my expectations.

Next: My MacBook user experience

Tips for presenting screen mockups

I just finished Dan Brown's excellent Communicating Design. It's a very practical cookbook of design documentation: how and when to use ten different types of deliverables. Brown writes from a consulting background, which is different from mine, so it was interesting to contrast it with my methods of working with internal company stakeholders.

When presenting a design to coworkers, I try to remember the following guidelines:

Do outline your specific goals at the beginning.  One mistake I used to make was presenting people with a mockup (whether in a meeting or over email) and simply asking for feedback without context. This laissez-faire approach tends to result in incorrect assumptions and irrelevant feedback.

Instead, introduce the mockup by explaining the rationale behind your design process, and ask for feedback on the specific aspects you need. If the conversation wanders, explain that parts of the visual aren't final enough to be ready for comments.

Don't show people many design alternates, even if you explored them yourself.  As Brown points out, this often brings about the dreaded Franken-design, when the stakeholder says "I like the header component from mockup 1, but the content component from login 2."  Research shows that comparing multiple choices can lead to greater dissatisfaction than if the stakeholder simply had one design to evaluate.

Moreover, stakeholders don't have time to look at your different directions and listen to you ruminate on the inevitable tradeoffs of design. So hang onto all your work, but don't introduce alternates unless they're needed to address a specific point that comes up.

Do tailor the process to individuals. On an internal team, you can learn what's aspects of design are important to each stakeholder and colleague. Ensure that your design addresses likely concerns and requirements and be ready to articulate how it does so.

Don't leave interactivity to a stakeholder's imagination. Web page mockups as a design deliverable are on the way out -- or, at least, they're no longer sufficient.  The nuances of how screen elements respond to users' actions can be critical for your larger team to understand, particularly when you're defining a new behavior not reflected elsewhere in your product.

Low-impact ways to model interactivity include keyframing and annotation.  For higher-fidelity prototyping, you can employ the interactive features of Visio or Powerpoint, or code a prototype using Axure or Flash.

Why I miss my deadlines, often

In my new job, I've been doing a lot of interaction design for a highly capable rich Internet application. It's a great job so far and I'm really enjoying it, except for one thing: I am almost never on time finishing things.

I did a fair amount of project management in my previous jobs, and missing deadlines bothers me.  As a result, I've been feeling pretty stressed lately at work.  Thinking about the problem over the winter holidays, I realized I've been underestimating two important learning curves.

The first is what I need to learn about the system.  After four months, I've learned a great deal about how everything works, but there's still a lot I don't yet understand.  There's no documentation to review -- I have to experiment with the system and talk to developers to get up to speed. Typically, the biggest problems arise from questions I didn't know to ask.

The second issue is how to document interaction for rich Internet applications.  Up to now, I've used annotated storyboards to document for stakeholders, developers, and QA.  There are good, well-received articles online describing how to do this, but in my work I've seen problems.  With some interactions, even the best description possible doesn't quite convey what you want to see in moving, 3D, real life.  In these cases you need an interactive prototype.

Specific tools exist for interactive prototyping, but what I'd really like is to learn Flash better, and use that to illustrate how UI such as drag-and-drop should function. I could learn Axure, or another interactive prototyping tool, but with Flash I'd have a much more flexible skill.  The problem is making the time to become proficient in Flash!  As a stopgap, I've been messing around with interactive prototypes made from Visio and Acrobat, and even from Powerpoint. 

Dasher interface types by pointing

This YouTube movie demonstrates the Dasher interface, developed at the University of Cambridge in the UK.  Dasher works by pointing to a letter in a vertical list.  The subsequent letters, weighted in order of probability, unfurl and you can keep pointing to make words and sentences.  Try Dasher in Java here.

It's flashy and interactive, and even elegant somehow. It's very quick with English dictionary words, but slow on proper nouns like names and places. I can imagine Dasher having great potential for disabled users, as well as for simple touchscreen interfaces.

Even cooler, what about a similar interface for choosing complementary colors or configuring a set of related product options?

(Link via GUUUI)

Usability named a Best Career

This week U.S. News & World Report magazine included usability / user experience specialist on their list of 31 top careers in the United States.  They do a reasonable job of explaining the position and putting it in context with a day-in-the-life feature, and they also include professional organizations and important books.

Although the article made good use of its concise column space, I think it would have been more interesting to interview actual practitioners. Without any quotes from real people the content feels artificial. Still, it's nice to get some mainstream recognition.

Google Charts API

If you do any display of usability result online, try out the Google Charts open API at http://code.google.com/apis/chart/. Unlike other chart APIs I have seen (Yahoo, for example), you don't need Javascript or any embedded code.  Just a correctly formatted URL.  There are plenty of examples at the Google code URL to get you started.  Don't forget to avoid legends whenever possible, though I'm disappointed the API doesn't currently support much in the way of labeling.

I wouldn't mind seeing a Web form to help with formatting the URLs though.  Anyone seen one yet?