I usually hate it when people blog about their sprogs but suddenly I understand… My daughter Lilly was born on saturday afternoon, 7 pounds 14, a little bundle of joy.
I’ll be fairly offline over the next two or three weeks, but I will be making a quick appearance at UX Brighton on Tuesday 13th May, where I’ll be giving a talk on out-of-box experience design. If you’re local, why not come along? I promise not to bore you with baby stories.
OK, maybe I will just a little. 
I promise to stop ranting about the evils opt-in / out-out design patterns, but I noticed a real gem today that I had to share with you:
It’s funny how the honest business objective of keeping in touch with your customers can get so twisted and contorted that it ultimately becomes this.
It runs full circle from “We want our customers to become loyal friends” to “Customers are just conversion statistics, and we will pull any trick in the book boost the numbers.”.
A big fat race to the bottom.
So, according to Jared Spool’s Keynote at IA Summit 08, “User-Centred Design is dead”. There’s a good write up by Mia Northrop of Avenue A | Razorfish here, and another by Molly Anglin of NLC here.
I usually love challenging the status quo and making bold claims to stimulate discussion. But in this case, I think it wasn’t particularly constructive. Why? Because for many people, UCD is a wooly philosophy that sits somewhere between the concepts of “putting users first”, Usability and, perhaps the vaguest of all terms, User Experience. To say UCD is dead raises the question, what exactly do you mean by UCD?
Let’s take a look at some excepts from Jared’s slides:
To say that “UCD never worked” implies that it’s a single thing. It’s not: it’s a container term. It’s a bit like the term ‘Web 2.0′: what goes inside depends on who’s holding it. Generally, though, the agreed constituents look a bit like this:
There are many different flavours, sizes and scales of UCD - different organisations tend to implement it differently in their design processes. So, unsurprisingly, those that love red tape and strict process will implement it in that way, while those that at the other end of the scale will use it as a flexible, lightweight approach.
So, should we really be throwing out a perfectly good container, or should be trying to hone and improve the recipe of things that go inside? Although Jared has overcooked his arguments, he’s done us all a service by stimulating a useful discussion about the recipe of effective design, regardless of what we call it.
Photo credits: Balakov on Flickr
Quietly announced on Twitter - Clearleft’s silverback app is going to be “Usability testing software for web designers”. See, I guessed right back in February!
As a result I’ve ended up on the alpha testing team. My lips are sealed except to say, yes, it is nice.
It’s quite interesting to watch the FOWD 08 conference tweets as they happen. I’m quite surprised at how much bitching is going on. Check out the flash widget below - come on guys, play nice!
Can’t see the flash widget? Maybe your RSS reader doesn’t support it.
Ethnio has come on a lot since I last checked - now it’s looking pretty damn good.
Ethnio is a tool for finding participants for user research by enlisting live users from your website. If you’re not sure what I mean by that, take a look at this explanatory video, charmingly made in felt using stop motion.
Ethnio requires you to have a live website that already has a decent user-base, so it’s not suited to early-stage research or non-web products.
It’s strength is in the amount of money it saves you. Normally, recruiting end users for face-to-face user research is hideously expensive. For example, in London, if you have specific criteria for your users, you’re talking £100 for the recruitment plus £50 incentive (i.e. payment for participation).
Ethnio is completely free to use, and it cuts out the recruitment costs - you pay users an incentive, and that’s it.
Quite a few slide decks from IA Summit 2008 are finding their way onto slideshare.
They all look great. As a taster, here’s Peter Morville’s Search Patterns presentation:
I don’t normally link to items from Etre’s Reaction blog , because I’m assuming that it’s probably already in your feed reader. If not, you’d do well to add it. Their posts are fun, visual and frequent, which is rare for a user experience blog.
Video found via Etre’s Reaction Blog. More videos like this are available at the University of Illinois Visual Cognition Lab
The debate about the ethics of opt in / opt out defaults in web forms never seems to go away. If you’ve read Chris Anderson’s Wired Article “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“, then you might know where I’m going with this: Ryanair.
To quote from the article: “how can a flight across the English Channel be cheaper than the cab ride to your hotel?
Put simply, they are skating a fine line and have to work very hard on their upsell for ancillary fees (point 2 above). This boils down to the interaction design of their upsell page.
The way they do this is by alternating between default states of opt-in and opt-out for the choices on the upsell page. Easyjet also does the same thing. This is ethically dubious.
I can understand their argument for doing this. In their minds, travel insurance and priority boarding are highly desirable products and they preselect them to save the user effort. To them, it’s persuasive salesmanship: “We have a number of options here for you sir, but we highly recommend priority boarding and insurance.”
However, there is a dark side to this design decision. You could argue that rather than being persuasive, it’s just plain sneaky. How would you feel if, when doing your weekly grocery shopping at the supermarket, one of the staff sneaked something into your basket. You’d be free to take it out as it rolled along the conveyor belt, but only if you were paying attention. And an extra tin of beans with your groceries, or travel insurance with your flight is a small additional cost so it’s very likely to slip by unnoticed.
You could liken it to old-fashionned bazzar-style bartering, where people who have their wits about them will a get lower price. Personally, I’m not so sure. While it might be a grey area, one way or another it’s going to annoy some customers. In the Independent last saturday, James Daley referred to the purchase process on Ryanair as an “enraging experience”. Others agree.
Providing a good UI for sorting and filtering search results key fundamental to making your long tail work.
Bill Scott (Director of UI Engineering at Netflix) wrote a post on this yesterday with lots of video clips and screen grabs. Nice post Bill! (& good comments too)
Also check out Theresa Neil’s post on The Ultra Rich Search Experience.
It’s a bit of a wild-west situation at the moment, with designers experimenting with lots of different design patterns, and users gradually learning about the “search, then progressively refine” interaction style. This is bound to change over the coming months.
That'll be me, Harry Brignull. I'm User Experience Consultant at Madgex in Brighton (UK). My work involves making experiences by blending User Research, Interaction Design and UCD process consultancy. In the past few years I've consulted for Nokia, British Airways, Vodafone, O2, AOL and many others.
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