This is great! The full text of Marti A Hearst’s Search User Interfaces book is available entirely for free online. The RRP is £30 and the book isn’t even due to be publicly available until September 30, 2009.
Caution: actual thought may be required when reading this book. It is an academic text, somewhat reminiscent of a PHD thesis literature review. Don’t expect any top-ten tips.
(via @konigi)
Fever is a new feed-reader from Shaun Inman, the guy who created Mint (The self-hosted analytics app, not the finance site). The concept of Fever is pretty clever – it parses your RSS feeds and works out which articles are the most popular. The UI uses a heat metaphor extensively, and as far as I can tell from my initial review, it has a bit of a learning curve associated with it. Users have to categorize their feeds into “sparks” and “kindling” which combine to produce “hot” items. If a particular article is linked to by various other articles in your “sparks” category, that article becomes “hot” and bubbles to the top of the hot list. The exact way in which it works is a bit of a mystery to me, though it is written in un-obfuscated PHP so it’s more a case of being under-explained at the moment, rather than secret.
I’m not familiar enough with it to give it a fair review, so I’m not going to even try in this post. Instead I’ve just taken a few screengrabs that should give you a rough feel for the app. Here they are:
As you can see, Fever needs a lot of screen estate. Although there is an iPhone UI, the full version does not sit well on small laptop screens.
The help tip for the ‘Hot’ area reads: Links from all of your feeds are weighted by frequency and disposition of the linking feed, then ordered by temperature using the normal body temperature of 37° as a base.
The ‘Kindling’ area provides an alphabetical filter and scroller that are nicely implemented.
The help tip for the ‘kindling’ area reads: Sparks are inessential feeds that increase the temperature of links in the Hot view. Their unread items will never appear in the Kindling supergroup or in any of your custom groups. Link blogs and sites that frequently repost content are excellent candidates for Sparks.
The ‘hot’ area can be filtered by recency (days or week), as shown here.
This is the app’s main menu. All the obvious stuff is located in here.
This is the preferences menu. If you want your installation to refresh the feeds automatically, you have to set up a cron job. This is fairly easy, but it constitutes “yet another configuration step”. If Fever runs slowly for you, you only have your own cheap hosting to blame. I installed Fever on a cheap Dreamhost account, and sluggishness is occasionally evident.
You can blacklist certain sites if you want to prevent them from appearing in your hot area.
Loads of keyboard shortcuts. All different from Google Reader, but probably not too hard to relearn.
The search results view. Here I’ve searched for “usability” and it’s returned the matching articles in the middle column.
Footnote: I misspelled Shaun’s name as Sean in the original post. Thanks to Ryan for pointing this out -I’ve now corrected it. Sorry Shaun!
Why do people do this? This email is the final step of an otherwise great marketing campaign. I’m not singling these guys out, it’s a common mistake that everyone seems to make. This email template relies entirely on images, but since most email clients have images turned off by default, the email falls flat. What’s enticing about the email shown above? What would drive a user to do turn the images on? Not much.
The lesson here is a simple one: images in email should be treated as progressive enhancements. In other words, emails should be perfectly readable and enticing with the images turned off – and they should be even better with them turned on. Simple, really.
Joan Doe is walking through the mall one day when she’s approached by someone with a clipboard. She has some free time, so she answers a few questions and gives them her email address. “Cool!”, she thinks to herself, ” £50 for turning up to a focus group and eating free pizza for an hour. Easy money!”. A few weeks pass and one day she gets an email inviting her to participate in some research. So, she picks a time slot and books herself in.
On the day she manages to find the offices in the center of town and presses the buzzer. A garbled voice invites her onto the second floor, and she finds herself sitting in a waiting room. “This reminds me of a job interview” she thinks to herself. “I can’t believe I’m feeling so nervous.” The receptionist tells her she’ll have to wait 5 minutes because the researcher needs to finish their current test session. “Researcher? Test? This is getting weird.”
Finally she is invited through by a tired looking man. It’s a small room with one table and two chairs. This is not what she expected. “Um, where are the other people for the focus group?” Joan asks timidly. The man gives her a quizzical look and explains it’s a one-to-one depth interview. She notices that one of the walls has a big mirror on it. A bit like in those police dramas. In fact, just like in those police dramas.
The researcher starts droning through a script. She feels like she’s having her rights read to her. He gestures for her to sign some kind of contract. This does not feel right. Not one bit. Joan starts to rationalise. “£50 for an hour. I can do this. Just answer the man’s questions. Almost a pound a minute. Just act normal and it’ll be over soon…”
When you’re used to running the show, it’s easy to forget what it’s like to be a research participant. It’s also easy to create a stressful situation, where the participant can’t concentrate and their only real care is to get through the session, get paid and get out.
At a company I worked at a few years ago, one of the Directors stored a load of their belongings in one of the labs while they were moving house. We ended up with well worn sofa, coffee table, stereo, rug, books, and even a pile of logs next to the fireplace. It was only meant to be temporary, but it turned out to be so inviting, we kept it like that. I admit, refurbishing your own lab might not be possible, so here are some practical tips for relaxed lab sessions:
Have you got any other tips you’d like to share? Add them in the comments, maybe together we can come up with an über-list!
Further amendment: all’s well that ends well – about 48 hours after the purchase, they gave me a full refund and were pretty nice about it. I guess I just caught them on a bad day.
Amendment: thanks for all the comments and advice here, on twitter and on the BNM mailing list. Looks like all the interest caused the shop to change their mind and offer me a refund.
I’m taking a break from my usual UX related stuff to ask for some advice in this post.
Last night I walked into Solutions inc in Brighton and bought a Macbook Pro. Or so I thought.
Having got the laptop home and started it up, I realized I’d been given a old model. I can understand how they made the mistake as it looks almost identical, is priced almost identically, and has almost identical packaging. The receipt shows that I bought the old model – but still, it was the store’s fault, as I clearly asked for the newer Pro model. So I went straight back in there and asked to swap it for the newer model and pay the small excess (only £50 or so).
Sounds reasonable? They wouldn’t take it back. They are saying they don’t legally have to take it back as I have opened the box, but in this case they will charge me a restocking fee (£50), plus the excess (approx £50) to give me the newer Macbook Pro. (Note: they aren’t offering me a refund, period).
They are also being really unpleasant, saying that if I take them to court they will win because “They’ve never lost a case at small claims court”. The manager, Daniel, wouldn’t even give me his surname. He also refused to give me the firstname or surname of the sales assistant who sold me the laptop (I suspect it may have been the sales assistant’s first day or something because he was having trouble with the till and didn’t know much about the stock).
So, my question is to you, dear readers, what do I do now? Do I take it back and pay the restocking fee (etc)? Or do I hang onto a computer that I don’t want, and go through the tiresome process of taking them to small claims court?
This did the rounds a few years ago, but it’s worth sharing again. it’s an interview with Dave Bradley who invented Ctrl-Alt-Delete.
“…I was just trying to solve a development problem we had. Brand new hardware, brand new software, you’re testing the stuff out – it would hang up all the time! The only solution you had was to turn the power off, wait for a few seconds, turn the power back on, wait for it to go through the power-on self test, and I said – I’m writing all this code for the keyboard, let’s just shortcut it! I originally intended for it to be [...] just something we were using in development. [...] It was a five minute job. I didn’t realize I was going to create a cultural icon when I did it. But I have to share the credit. I invented it, but I think Bill made it famous. [Bill Gates pulls a bemused face, crowd laughs] … When you used it for NT logon! That’s what I meant! Okay… Oh boy!”"
Can’t see the youtube video above?
It’s interesting that Ctrl-Alt-Delete is an annoyance that was never quite annoying enough to warrant being killed off in its youth. As a result, it’s become so entrenched that it’s here for good – a vestigial feature, like the human appendix. Useless, but part of the DNA.
Most good design processes take inspiration from evolution. In other words, a bunch of designs are tried out, the worst performers are killed off, and the best performers are bred. In real life, animals evolve through the process of mutation, sex and death. In the world of human-driven design, we don’t have this luxury, so we have to track the performance of our creations and do the breeding and the culling ourselves.
This begs the question, are you doing enough mutation, sex and death in your own design process?
That'll be me, Harry Brignull. I'm a User Experience Consultant at Madgex in Brighton. My work involves building 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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