Compete on Usability

Build As I Do, Not As I Say

Here's another problematic quote usability practitioners are used to hearing from clients.

"We don't need usability because we listen closely to our customers and build the features they need, the way they want them."

This viewpoint is prevalent in the enterprise software market. When a customer is worth thousands or millions of dollars, it's very difficult for a business to turn down their feature ideas! Building to customer request seems user-centric and laudable, but often, it's a philosophy leading to expensive, unusable designs.

Instead of building to customer wishlists, focus on what your customers actually do. If they request a new feature, interview them carefully to understand why they want it. You may find that a different type of feature would meet their needs even better. Customers may be adept at what they do, but they're not likely to be interface experts. You must listen to their suggestions, but hear their goals and address those goals with good, usable design.

Sometimes, the feature customers want is one they already have. Consider Microsoft Office. The recent 2007 release concentrated on user interface since, in a customer survey, 90% of requested new features already existed, hidden in the software interface.

Agile and Social Networks Challenge Usability

On Wednesday, I attended the 2007 Boston Mini-UPA conference. There were over 300 user experience professionals in attendance, and believe it or not, more hiring companies than job seekers! This is a great time for the field.

One conference meme was the growing use of Agile development methods, and the increased pressure Agile can place on usability. Deadlines are forcing practitioners to conduct less formal usability testing, and to fall back on quicker methods such as heuristic evaluations and user surveys. Fortunately for interaction designers, two tools I saw for rapid prototyping are improving to keep up the pace.

Jared Spool of UIE brought up another interesting usability head-scratcher. When evaluating social networking sites, where the whole experience revolves around people interacting, how can you test the site one participant at a time? You might need hundreds or thousands of other people rating, responding, and creating their own content, or it's not a valid test. It's another reason why Web 2.0 companies might conduct less formal usability testing in the future.

Usability reports?

At a party the other night, I met a software developer who happened to be looking for a usability consultant to evaluate his startup's web-based application. This is the first time that's happened to me! I believe it's a sign the usability field continues to mature and gain legitimacy, although that may be confirmation bias.

Anyway, he believed the application needed improvement, but he was very wary about asking for help.  He'd commissioned heuristic analysis with usability consultants in the past but their "Word documents with mockups," (said disparagingly) were not what he was looking for. I didn't understand at first because what he described sounded like a very typical usability report.

After a long discussion, we clarified the problem with the reports. Because he and his development team only can think about usability intermittently, the reports tended to sit around awhile before they were ready to refer back to them. And without lots of extra context, it simply took too long to decipher context and meaning. It seemed like a classic cognitive overload moment.

Do you have a standard report template you use successfully?  And have you ever needed to come up with something more involved to meet client needs?

Minority Interfaces of the Future

Remember the cool gesture-based computer interface used by Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report? Unless you're employed in a very specialized field (like futuristic crimefighter), you probably won't be using one at work anytime soon.

The main reasons relate to space. Picture the typical officeworker's cubicle, and add a huge display and an arm-spanning volume in which to move one's hands around. Now, imagine the opportunities for spilling coffee and bumping passers-by. There are also accessibility issues with an interface requiring two hands, and a full range of body motion.

Nevertheless, motion control has future for the majority. The Nintendo Wii continues to outsell the competition, and introduce new audiences to videogames, with its motion-sensing controllers. In addition, universities and companies are refining gesture-based interfaces for niche audiences. You don't need glowing fingertips to use interfaces like these:

• Tactiva gesture drawing program demo movie
• MIT Perceptive Interfaces

 

Microsoft oPhone

Take a break and view this spoof on Microsoft and its imagined response to the Apple iPhone. I particularly enjoyed the wild-eyed interaction designer and his demo of the boomerang feature.

Scratch: usability for kids

A hot topic right now, in both programming and education, is the Scratch programming language just released as a free download from MIT.  Featured on the BBC and Boston.com, Scratch was designed for kids, using a Lego or jigsaw-puzzle metaphor to construct code from virtual building blocks.

It's another children's education coup for MIT, coming soon after the $100 laptop began shipping.  Moreover, it's a nice way to promote the value of usability for children.  Kids are often stereotyped as quicker than parents when it comes to figuring out any technology, or selfishly absorbed by games and online chatter. Similarly, educational games can be controversial, derided as "edutainment" or branding vehicles for companies like Disney.

When you move beyond simplistic stereotypes, there's plenty of opportunity to design kid-friendly, educational tech products.  Notable, usable young children's websites include PBS for Kids and Noggin.

"I thought that was an ad."

It's a common, and unwelcome, comment during consumer website usability testing. Users first ignore the page's most prominent feature, then fumble around the page's links and text for awhile, before finding the feature some other way or stopping in frustration.

When you ask them if you saw the big, carefully designed component for Feature X, they respond to show you that they perceived it, but they didn't really see it. They thought it was an ad.

Seeing a webpage for the first time, users categorize regions at a glance. Certain design cues will suggest content to them (columns of text, navbars, form elements) and others suggest ads.  Along with that initial glance, most users are conditioned today to look mostly in specific areas for the page content.

Here are the top design aspects that may cue users to think something is not content:

• Shape: Wide rectangles
• Position: Top of the page or on the right side
• Color: A different background color than the rest of the page
• Border: box blindness
• Different fonts from the rest of the page
• Unexpected animation or use of images

This post is really about designing content, not ads, but you can view some additional relevant pointers on banner blindness, animation avoidance, and pop-up closing from Jakob Nielsen.

Fight customer contempt

A recent study emphasizes that personal computers and broadband Internet are much slower to penetrate the U.S. consumer market than televisions have been.

This ought to come as no surprise -- many people's lives don't revolve around technology. What I found shocking was the reaction to the news on Slashdot, a "news for nerds" forum frequented by Internet cognoscenti and software developers. The most common overall theme -- contempt -- is summed up with quotes like these:

• "People are afraid of computers, and as usual are unwilling to overcome even the most modest of barriers to learn a new skill."
• "The computer takes not only knowledge and mental ability, but the worst part it takes EFFORT to use."
• "People don't use computers willingly because they require that you not be stupid in order to use them proficiently."
• "Human stupidity and laziness, especially the reluctance to take the time to learn key concepts such as computer security and e-mail attachment limits."

If you hear attitudes like these among your coworkers, don't let them go unchallenged. Elitist snobbery is bad for business. Contempt for customers trickles through to your products in the form of poor usability, shoddy QA, off-target marketing, and ultimately even deceptive and fraudulent business practices.

Are consumers who don't adopt your products lazy or dumb? Only if you've done a very bad job of defining your target audience. Business-to-business firms fight this perception by being very clear they're selling "solutions." Stop selling technology -- sell things your customers actually want, or need but don't yet know they need.

Defining and using personas is another great way to defeat customer contempt. Ground them in research data (not assumptions or based on one person you know) and they become almost like real people, with usability concerns you can relate to and design to overcome.

How does MySpace win?

The social networking site MySpace.com is a polarizing force among design and usability advocates. There are certain aesthetic principles that ought to be universal, so how can MySpace be so ugly, so difficult to use, and yet remain so popular?

Let's get some of the less satisfactory explanations out of the way:

• It's just a fad. Well, MySpace visits keep increasing.  Its popularity may not last forever, but what does?
• Kids don't know what's good. Tell that to Nike, Burger King,  or Apple. Style and brand are extremely important to teenagers.
• Teenagers follow their friends, and rebel against what adults value. These cliches don't explain why MySpace topped other websites built for rebellious youth.

I'm not sure anyone has definitively established the secret to MySpace's success, but here are a few partial explanations that make sense to me:

• Believe it or not, it's user-centered design. MySpace has focused on the features their target audience wants, and better site design or nicer-looking templates simply aren't on the list.
• "I'm with the band." When you're talking about the American Idol, Paris Hilton generation, nothing is more important than being famous. MySpace optimized itself for musicians to set up websites, and their fans join just to watch for concert photos, score free tracks, and hope that a rock star will respond to their comments.
• It's a mess, just like a teenager's bedroom. MySpace may not be intuitive or easy to use, but it is extremely flexible, allowing all the garish colors, bizarre pictures, and trend-of-the-moment videos its users want to post.
• It doesn't put on airs. It seems odd that the main website, at least, doesn't have a better design. But that's a strength for MySpace because it keeps them close to their audience of enthusiastic non-designers. 

Target pharmacy competes

I started using a Target pharmacy near my home and was immediately impressed with their prescription system, featuring pill bottles designed to be easier to read and tell apart.  Their pharmacy sells the same drugs as any other, but more usable packaging allows them to differentiate.

As a business strategy, competing on usability makes sense for Target's new pharmacies. The company must take market share from established businesses -- what better way than to introduce a prescription system that's more modern and usable? When your product packaging ends up in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, you must be doing something right.