Compete on Usability

Daylight screen backlash

Via Usability News, I found a press release saying 60-80% of British consumers have trouble reading their portable device screens outdoors, with 44% saying they were misled by advertising showing people using them in daylight.

Note that the press release quoted research sponsored by a next-gen screen vendor. While the data may be accurate, it's being released as blatant marketing spin to create a need for the vendor's products. Still, the data seems intuitive to me. My cell phone's large, bright screen is unreadable even in overcast conditions, let alone sunny skies.

Color-reflective displays, optimized for bright light viewing and low battery drain, have existed for years. Early implementations of the technology, however, caused a real backlash. First versions of the Game Boy Advance's dim screen, as well as the DS (pictured), were derided by industry press.  These days manufacturers seem to rely on displays using the opposite technology, perhaps hoping consumers will grow inured to squinting and hand shading in order to use their cell phones and handhelds.

It doesn't have to be this way.  Screens can be optimized for both types of ambient lighting. I always thought it was too expensive, but if a $100 laptop designed for children has a screen that works well both in daylight and indoors, why don't we all have one?  So I hope pressure builds and consumers begin to reject their dim displays.

The Customer is Never Dumb

Call an event "just a dumb mistake" or "human error," and you can expect glares and lectures from usability professionals. It's equivalent to telling a teacher "those who can, do, those who can't, teach."

If you've ever been on the receiving end of this cliche, be aware most people do believe in something called "human error" that excuses most "dumb" mistakes. I agree with the field's orthodox opinion that users are never simply dumb.

Instead, they are:

• Busy and multitasking. Your users often will be in a context where they must multitask -- this is otherwise known as "real life." To minimize dumb mistakes, reduce your interface's demands on their attention. List information in familiar ways. Supply everything needed to complete a task on the same page. Consider interruptions: for example, can your users recover from a phone call and still complete their tasks?
• Overloaded with information. Dumb mistakes can result from too many choices, so take care to only show a reasonable amount of relevant info at once. It's not enough to just say "let the user choose." You have to know your users' needs, and design for them a limited number of intelligent choices.
• Hardwired for speed. Humans evolved to make decisions rapidly. Your users are information predators. They'll scent out your relevant links and functions and try them quickly, but they'll be just as quick to lose interest and try something else if the scent disappears. When your workflow includes clear hints at every step, you'll keep users' attention on what's relevant to them.

You want your interface to make users feel smart. Fast. Effective. If your interface makes users feel like "human errors" instead, well who's dumb then?

Enter your email address twice?!

Update 6-May-2008: Okay folks. Some wags have been entering their emails twice, as comments to this post.  It remains my most commented post after almost a year, but I've been deleting many comments as spam. I'll let you play the game if you post substantive comments in addition to your email addresses. Thanks!

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To the left is a thumbnail of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles website, registration renewal form.  (It's linked to a pop-up full size version.) I visited today and ran into one of my pet online peeves.

Enter E-mail Address:

Enter E-mail Address Again (for verification):
Note: You must provide a valid E-mail address to receive a receipt for this transaction.

I'm baffled why many sites force people to type their emails out twice. Do they think it will prevent mistakes?  That's the reason to enter password twice.  If the password you create looks like ******** in the field, you might make a typo without realizing it and not be able to log back in.  So double password entry makes sense.  But when you see your email address as you enter it, you can correct mistakes like you would with anything else you type into a computer.

I honestly don't know why sites design in double email fields, but my guess is it's meant to discourage users from entering something bogus. It may or may not be effective, but it's a lame technique that slows people down. You're missing an opportunity to build trust by telling users the value you bring them.  If email address really is important, simply communicate why to your users.  For example:

Enter E-mail Address:
We will send your receipt to your email address above.

The supporting text provides enough contextual info so that users see the value of entering a real email address.

If email address really doesn't provide any value to users, only to your marketing department, get used to people quitting your workflow or entering junk.  In usability tests of consumers, I find concerns about spam and their personal info to be among the most frequent unsolicited comments about an interface.  It takes communicated value to overcome their resistance and build trust.

Halo effect, data-driven UX, design is not art

The Halo Effect: Why Apple gets away with rubbish interaction design
Leisa Reichelt notes that Apple's brand strength in design allows them to take a pass where other companies would be criticized. (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Data Driven Personas - UPA 2007 Tutorial
Patrick Kennedy touches on user experience practitioners' awkward relationship vis-a-vis statistical data.

Design is Not Art
Unlike art, says Joshua Porter, design is meant to be used, and so its results can be evaluated. (Via InfoDesign)

Successful Web Workflow, Part I

I have worked online for years, and I've become inured to the tedium of completing forms whenever I register for an account or buy something online. So it's a good reality check to run a user study, and hear sighs and the unhappy words, "Do you want me to fill this out?" when participants realize they're in a workflow.

Workflows are multistep processes where a user must enter information and make decisions to complete a task. Always remember the subconscious "quid pro quo" of Web forms. Users never want to fill out your forms! They only want what's behind them, and they will tolerate your forms as long as the anticipated reward seems worth the effort. So it's very much in your interest to minimize their efforts with thoughtful, usable workflow design.

The following guidelines are more general heuristics than hard-and-fast rules. When it comes to Web workflows, there's as many kinds of good designs as there are types of information to gather.

• The fewer fields, the better. Here's a contentious one. Businesses will always want to gather more information about customers, and users always will want fewer fields to fill out. Keep in mind the ultimate objective is to get users to the finish line successfully. Ecommerce sites in particular will find extra questions to be costly.
• The fewer pages, the better. This is more of a marketing guideline than a principle of usability. Generally speaking, each additional page is another opportunity for users to drop out of the process. Sites like eBay and Microsoft are removing pages from their workflows with AJAX forms that dynamically change questions to reflect prior inputs.
• Use a progress indicator. Your users have no idea how many steps there are to go unless you communicate it to them. Users who feel lost are likely to abandon your workflow.
• Forms are for your users, not your servers. Don't force users to conform to your fields. Ensure forms don't choke on currency symbols, punctuation, and other normal language inputs. More examples: allow user to select dates from a calendar widget. Support keyboard shortcuts (tabbing, Enter to submit). Consider accessibility.
• Label buttons to clearly indicate the next step. "Submit" is usually an unhelpful label. Use Purchase, Sign Up, Download, and the like. Be consistent too --  don't use Continue on one page and Next on the subsequent page.

More guidelines to come.

Working with designers

Jakob Nielsen's recent post The Myth of the Genius Designer coincided with a marketing class I'm taking. My grizzled, veteran marketing professor distrusts designers. He punctuates criticisms of TV and radio ads by reflexively blaming "the creatives" for any shortcomings in the message.

I'm a positive guy, so my guidelines for working with designers are not so cynical. Just as you must know your users when building a system, to work best with designers you must understand their challenges.

• Everyone has an opinion about your designs. People who work in engineering, finance, and marketing rarely have colleagues from other departments wander by and offer unsolicited opinions on their code, accounting methods, or ad spending plans. Designers can look forward to this kibitzing every day.
• What are your qualifications? Other professionals can point to their MBA's, CPA's, or MSCE's as evidence of their expertise. On the other hand, designers are disrespected for their lack of business credentials. Few people understand how an art school curriculum prepares people for a design career.
• You're always compensating for other people's constraints. The design must accommodate the limitations of a system's functionality and shift to fit copy changes. But designers never can say, "My design doesn't support that code."

As a user experience specialist, you sometimes can be another source of headaches to designers who don't want more work supporting accessibility, affordance, or the results of user testing. Here are some ways to work better with designers.

• Support your recommendations objectively. Don't be another kibitzer to the designer. Back up your design ideas with human factors principles and user research.
• Present usability as part of design. Communicate to all that usability studies are not about judging or rejecting a design. Collecting and applying user experience is an integral part of the design process.
• Prioritize and work to deadline. If you have a perfectionist designer who fiddles with details too much, help them out by continually returning to business priorities. Never ask for a set of changes without clearly explaining the most important and then asking when they will be done.
• Ac-cen-tuate the positive. Start with mentioning the design's best aspects. Also, keep in mind that while it's easy to poke holes in a design, creating a new, original display or interface is much more difficult. Acknowledge your colleagues' efforts.

Memory myths

A recent NY Times article about the role of forgetting relates to a password phenomenon I've seen.  When you're using a password-protected interface, and you have to change the password, it's more difficult to recall the second password.  The old memory of the original password competes in your memory, an effect cognitive psychologists call interference.

One famous myth is that we only use 10% of our brains.  Disproved by countless MRI exams, this legend serves only to bolster claims of ESP and paranormal abilities. Computer interfaces certainly can tax all of our available brainpower!

Another familiar memory myth is that some people have eidetic memories or "total recall."  This is a controversial claim.  How could you prove that a person truly remembered everything?  This researcher, for example, is convinced eidetic memory is bogus.

More to the point of user experience, evidence has piled up that people's memories are faulty. Avoid relying on people's memories to accomplish tasks ... instead, design in memory aids and contextual reminders. After all, it would be quite inefficient to remember everything, as Sherlock Holmes reminds us:

"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent."

Market health care

Health care in Massachusetts (my home state) is undergoing a quiet revolution. A new law requires that all state residents enroll in a health insurance plan by the end of the year. Other states have, or will have, similar regulations. Meanwhile, the United States as a whole continues to struggle with new prescription coverage plans for senior citizens.

In both situations, consumers have many choices between both private and government health plans. Unfortunately, many have a tough time choosing because, as one good article points out, the plans aren't set up to match consumers' mental models of health care.  In Massachusetts, some people chose the plans with the lowest initial costs, then suffered high rate increases after the plans had signed up enough new members.

Software's dirty little secret

Legalese is a growing blight on the tech industry. Every time users download a plug-in or open a shrink-wrapped box, they're confronted with a dense passage of text. End user license agreements (EULAs) are a lightning rod for consumer backlash, or simply passive cynicism and distrust of the industry.

Here's the secret: it doesn't have to be this way. Take Yahoo's Terms of Service: it's a model of clearly organized, readable text. Yahoo competes by reassuring users with a lucid description of what they do with their data. They build trust and even delight users with an unexpected good experience.

At your company, don't assume you must accept an unreadable EULA. Discuss with your legal team how you can make your EULA more consumer-friendly. Show them the Yahoo Terms to illustrate the difference between legalese and legible. If all else fails, inserting a prize message into your terms will eventually get someone's attention!

First Human-Powered Search?

When I first came upon Mahalo, the new Hawaiian-themed search site, its description immediately gave me reason to doubt. They are FAR from the "world's first human-powered search engine." The major 1990s search engines, including Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, and LookSmart, built custom pages for popular, high-revenue terms like cars, travel, and tech. Even today, sites like the Open Directory have far more human-edited content.

Mahalo's information architecture is suspect too. Its ten main categories are listed in no particular order -- alphabetizing them would be nice, like other directory sites do. The hierarchy is also unclear. Why do they give Music and Television their own categories, but bury movies under Entertainment? Why are there seven top link picks for each result ... no more, no less?

The site makes more usability mistakes:

• Ratings and ranked lists that don't necessarily correspond to users' needs
• Breaking the Google paradigm with no helpful metadata for recommended links
• No breadcrumbs

It's very difficult to see how Mahalo can compete with either Google's machine-based search breadth or Wikipedia's human-edited depth of content.