Compete on Usability

Recruiting for a usability evaluation of Boston.com

On Saturday March 27 and Saturday April 3rd, 2010, I'm looking for people in MA to provide feedback on the Boston.com website for my class project. We are hosting one-hour evaluations at Bentley University in Waltham, but we also need at least one person to participate online from home. We're seeking 25-34 year olds and 45-54 year olds.

My student team will ask participants to use a computer and perform some basic tasks using Boston.com. It's easy and fun, and we're offering a $25 amazon gift card to participants.

Please comment if you might be interested, and I can tell you more. Thanks!

It's a defect … it's a feature … it's an experience bug

On the software and web projects for which I've done user experience design, I've been fortunate to work with thorough and thoughtful quality assurance (QA) engineers. Frequently these folks will enter tickets for uncertain issues, such as "I expected something to happen, but instead something else did. Is that expected behavior?" In other words, is that a bug or a feature?

There are three typical characteristics of what I call experience bugs. First is the uncertainty in whether an issue must be fixed. Frequently the behavior is as designed, but it just doesn't make sense to the quality assurance engineer. It could be nothing, or it could be a problem that no one noticed before now.

Second is uncertainty in what the fix ought to be. With other software defects, frequently the nature of the fix is self-evident. In a complex system, however, gaps in the user experience many be unanticipated until late in the development process. There might be no fix possible, but often some lateral thinking can save the day.

Third, the call on how to fix something starts with you, the user experience lead. That's because experience bugs require a design solution. The big gotcha here is making the first, quick recommendation that comes to mind, because you're feeling launch deadline pressure. Watch out, because a small fix to one part of the experience can ramify. Instead, test your first idea by returning to your design documentation, talking it through with a coworker, or just walking through the new experience on paper. Think back to a past situation that applies, and run a mental reality check to make sure the solution won't cause problems in other parts of the experience.

It's great to have QA involved and have experience tickets in the bug tracking database. You can, and should, enter them yourself whenever you discover an inconsistency or when a stakeholder has a question about the UI that makes you doubt. But your responsibility doesn't end there. If it's a significant issue, it's critical to get the attention of the development manager, product manger, or whoever's in charge of prioritizing fixes. Experience bug descriptions can be difficult to follow, and likely there are many bugs competing for priority. You may need to telephone or sit down with decisionmakers and help them understand a bug's importance.

You can forestall false experience bugs by supplying QA with all possible information about the final design. A QA engineer's background knowledge about the experience is mostly up to you. If you have access to your engineers before the QA phase of the project, you can walk them through your prototype, specifications, or wireframes to impart that background knowledge. If not, you may be able to capitalize on their first false experience bug as a teachable moment.

What have you learned from trying to fix UX problems in a project's QA phase?

Months after launch, Google Wave is missing key features

I had an opportunity to try and use Google Wave "for real" on a project, but what a disappointing experience! It might have been tough for any product to live up to their revolutionary pre-launch buzz, but Wave appear to lack very basic features that any collaborative online tool must have.

First and most obvious, it's stunning that Wave offered no alert feature. Collaboration software is of little value if you have to click a bookmark and pull it back to your browser to see if there are updates. Clearly Wave was not optimized for asynchronous communication, which is the strength of email. Now it appears Wave finally will get email notification.

The features that did make it for launch are sometimes questionable. Seeing others type in real time seems of narrow utility, and even though I'm a reasonably good typist, I feel self-conscious knowing I'm being observed. It's also difficult to find the latest updates in a multithreaded Wave. It requires much scrolling … and by the way, what's up with that wacky scroll widget? Do users need a new way to scroll as much as they need email alerts of new messages?

It's possible some of these doubtful feature decisions result from the product development process. A team in Australia built Wave, isolated from the Google mothership. This startup-in-a-bottle model is popular in large companies that want to remain entrepreneurial. When launching a new Google product, though, it's natural to expect it will work well with one's Google account. Whether it's the development team's isolation or some other factors at play, Google Wave has no integration with Google Accounts or any other of the company's online services.

Bloggers and journalists bitten by the promise of revolution pushed back against Wave in the early days. Now, however, the Web hype machine has moved on and Wave has no buzz at all. Time will tell if Google can add enough features to make the product useful and usable.

Wave's poor feature set, along with recent privacy missteps in the launch of Buzz, make Google suddenly seem vulnerable for the first time in years. Whether they mine their massive store of user data to assemble a product like Buzz, or they build a new system separate from everything as in Wave, Google need solid information on user behavior and needs to guide their decisionmaking. Without it, the giant company risks becoming inscrutable and remote from consumer end users -- just like Microsoft, in other words.