Compete on Usability

The pieceless puzzle

Wouldn't it be great to have a jigsaw puzzle that cleans up easily? What if you never had to worry about losing a piece?

Introducing the world's most usable jigsaw puzzle, the Pieceless Puzzle.  All the "pieces" are connected.  Pictured is the puzzle shaken out into formlessness.  In this mode it looks like a mass of dried, cooked spaghetti.  If you assemble it, though, it looks just like a completed jigsaw puzzle.

The video doesn't mention this, but I assume that by connecting all the puzzle pieces, they have reduced the difficulty of completing the puzzle somewhat.  But hey, no chance of losing a piece!

Needs of the many, needs of the few

When thinking about interface design, one of my heuristics is to weight features by how likely they are to be useful to the target audience. You should know your audience, know what they're looking for, and ensure they can find it easily.

Relevancy seems like an obvious way to set up an interface's hierarchy, but product managers I've worked with often want to give the new features heavy visual weight, regardless of their relevance. This reflects less a user-centered view and more of an internal focus. A new feature represents effort, and naturally the company wants to give their new work every opportunity to be seen.

For example, imagine a product manager and a user experience person conversing:

PM: "Let's put a big link at the top of our homepage to our company's new investor site!"

UX: "Uh, don't forget, only a handful of site visitors really are interested in investor information. I checked over our competitors and very few have an Investors link anywhere on their home pages. It's not good to clutter our homepage with too many extraneous links."

PM: "Yeah, but it's just one link."

UX: "The problem is, we launch five similar new features a month, and they all want prominent placement just for being new. We risk drowning out the content most visitors want in a wall of links!" (Translation: this is failure for me.)

PM: "Well, what if people can't find our new investor info?" (Translation: this is failure for me.)

The product manager has a point here. Don't forget about "the needs of the few." Design for them by categorizing niche features in relevant places. Build a flexible design from the beginning, because whether your interface is for a website or for a software product, there will always be new features tacked on after the fact.

First, see what other, comparable websites do: for example, are users likely to find the investor info under a company's About Us section? Another options is to give the feature temporary or rotating prominent placement. Some websites might give investor info extra prominence every financial quarter or every year, when visitors are most likely to be seeking it.

UX practitioners rated

Edit: Please note the chart at the left is to satirize the "guru factor" in user experience. It does not represent my thoughts, and it's not taken from any site listed here.

The recent redesign of information architecture site Boxes & Arrows puts heavy emphasis on reputation ratings. Online ratings are applied to all registered users on the site (authors and commenters) as well as site articles. I've almost always agreed with the article ratings on Boxes & Arrows, so it seems like a useful feature to me.

Ratings of people, however, is less straightforward. The rating system is heavily weighted towards content contributors, in effect making them "superusers" with scores or hundreds of reputation points. Whenever they post their opinions in comments, their status is obvious. Although rating points are meant to be a broad range, the system as implemented creates a clear binary divide among members.

Taking the ratings trend a step further is a new site, UX Zeitgeist. They attempt to rank books, user experience topics, and even people. Its publishers "believe our ranking system is wildly, brilliantly innovative and one of the most useful features of UX Zeitgeist." Perhaps it is, but they beg the question why is it useful to rank people at all.

UX rating sites bring to my mind the concept of A-list bloggers. Popularity equals wisdom and power in the blogosphere.  But the problem is, you can't accurately judge the value of information in a single swift rating. An article useless for one person with one kind of goal, is priceless to the next person with different goals.  A-list ratings create a winner-take-all information ecology that can obscure a long tail of personally relevant content. Instead, user experience experts ought to professionalize and promote the field with a system that less resembles the United States homeland security threat indicator.

Scratch the surface of UX Zeitgeist, and there's one immediate hole in the person rankings. Where's Jakob Nielsen? Perhaps he didn't reveal his favorite books -- participation that appears to be required for listing. If so, I think opting out of this attempted Who's Who of UX is laudable.

Interviewing for a usability job

I recently completed a series of interviews for a new job.  Here are a couple of reminders of areas where I think I did well, and others where I could have done better.

Assemble a portfolio, even if they don't ask for it. Some companies may care a lot about your portfolio, and some may not even ask for one.  Either way, it's always worth the effort to put together examples of your best work. The exercise will recall work stories you can speak to in the interview to sell your strengths.

Be honest ... Usability evaluations involve judgments. There's a temptation to try and "pass" the interview by saying what you think the interviewer wants to hear.  If you can support your position with solid reasoning, though, a good boss-to-be shouldn't hold their disagreement against you.

If you're not honest, you're interviewing to be a approval-seeking flunkie. And if your interviewers are put off by your honesty, perhaps it's a sign of how it might be to work with them.

... But also be humble. It's easy to criticize someone else's effort when you don't know what kind of time, budget, or business constraints they were under. Don't be an arrogant outsider dismissing an interface that may have resulted from the hard word of the interviewer.

Prepare for the obvious questions, such as

• "What do you think of the usability of X?" Usually you can guess from tone how the interviewer already feels about product or website X. If you disagree, be ready to back up your opinion with  some good supporting evidence.
• "Give me some examples of products and websites with good usability." This is a simple question to ask, but it deserves more than a quick answer. Prepare at least a couple of good examples, with explanations of what users the products are for, and why specifically they will find the product usable.
• "What is your working style?" Most employers are looking for excellent communicators, persuasive negotiators, and above all collaborative coworkers.
• "Do you think your background fits this position?" Once you've learned more about the position and the company, sell yourself as best you can, but be honest too. For example, if you are someone like me, with less of an academic background, you might not be happy on a team of all Ph.D. HCI experts.
  

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