90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

I sometimes feel like Windows is a bit like a junior employee who looked great on paper, but asks you way too many questions about trivial stuff, and can’t make a decision on their own. In other words, they rely completely on micromanagement. If Windows was this person you would end up snapping at them “Look, just take care of it, I don’t want to have to tell you how!”

Here’s my top 3 micromanagement shortfalls:

1. Not looking after your data
If Windows really cared about my data, it would go to the ends of the earth to keep it safe. Ideally the only time I want to think about backing-up is the first time I set up my PC when I take it out of its box. Sure, I may need to pay extra for a PC with more hard disks, but if I’m willing to do that, Windows should be ready to help me. (If Windows can’t offer it because of anti-trust issues, then a third party app will have to do.)

2. Not keeping itself fit
So you’ve had your PC for a year and its starting to slow down. Argh. What do you do? It’s probably due to one of the many applications you’ve installed- but which one? If slowdown can’t be prevented, then I want my PC to have a degree of self awareness. If it starts running slower than normal, I want it to diagnose itself and take appropriate action- unload some of those tray apps, disable some of those shell hooks, do what needs to be done. And only talk to me when a big decision needs to be made.

3. Allowing file transfers to fail, and just giving up on them
If I am moving a load of files from one place on the network to my PC, I don’t come back a few hours later to find its just failed, with no option to resume. That is sooo lame. If I tell Windows to do something, it should try its very best to do it, not give up at the first hurdle.

Now I know Windows Vista has taken steps to remedy some of the issues listed above, but there are still more buttons to be clicked, settings to be set, and dialogs to be dealt with than are really necessary. Technological progress should make our lives simpler.

I’ve noticed that when pitching an idea, some web design firms still print their designs off as posters and stick them on mounting board. If you think you’re client is going to really like this, then go ahead, but you should do the following things to ensure that you are accurately setting your client’s expectations of what the site will look and feel like.

1. After you have done your design, export it as a bitmap image with the exact pixel width the website will be.
2. Clearly mark where the fold will appear on the page, for an XGA screen. The jury is out on the exact height since you can’t be sure how much toolbar cruft a user has on screen (e.g. bookmarks bar, Google toolbar, or neither?). Some sites are more daring than others, and feel free to show a range (two lines), but either way, make sure you show something.
3. Now, look at your design closely. Is important information below the fold? Are some of your fonts or images barely legible or comprehensible? If so, go back and adjust your design.
4. Now, take your bitmap and print our your poster. You will notice that the fonts are jagged, and you may baulk. Tough - this is what it will look like in reality. This way you are accurately setting your client’s expectations of what the site will look like.

By doing this, you will avoid some embarrassing situations. For example, when your first prototype gets put into a web browser and shown to users, you avoid having feedback like “I can’t read the text” or “What do I have to click on to get to the next page?… Oh I didn’t realize I had to scroll down.” This is exactly what happened when I was recently doing some user testing on some mock-ups another firm had produced. It was embarrassing for them and didn’t get them off to a great start with our mutual client.

Or, of course, you could forget about printing out a poster, which is both easier and more realistic. Put your mock-up into a browser and show it to your client on a data projector.

Microsoft Onenote is an odd beast. It has some potentially great features that don’t seem to be properly executed yet. One of these features is the way it allows you to record audio or video (e.g. via a mike or webcam) and take notes simultaneously (as pictured). Then, after the recording, you can click on any line of your notes and have the audio/video jump to that point. (All it does is it time-stamp each line you type and associate it with the recording - quite simple really). This is amazingly useful for live transcription while recording interviews, podcasts, lectures, minute taking in meetings, and most importantly in my line of work, taking notes in usability tests & focus groups.

For example, the average user testing project generates about 18 hours of video. You can’t give it all to your client and expect them to trawl through it - you have to give them some way of getting to the good bits quickly.

It seems like a no-brainer to me that a tool like Onenote could easily offer a one-click export function for stand-alone video or audio file with chapter markers, a series of files segmented on the basis of the timestamps, or even an Enhanced Podcast as Guy Kewney suggests in his recent article in The Register.

As well as Onenote, Morae, VisualMark and Noldus all kind of offer this functionality, but none of them do it properly - yet.

Want your podcast audio transcribed each week automatically? Got a big image database that needs meta tagging? Well the future’s here, and you only need to pay a few cents per item.

Enter the mechanical turk, which everybody seems to be talking about at the moment. It’s a fancy name for hiring in a bunch of temps to do a bunch of 60 second jobs for you, via the web (and via an API if you’re a programmer).

Apparently there are thousands of people out there willing to take on your monotonous tasks for a pittance. The great thing is, you never have to meet them, deal with pesky employee rights like minimum wage, or look at their faces gradually crumple in the drudgery of the job you have given them, since it’s all done using the wonderful anonymity of the internet.

As a mechanical turk worker you just log into a website like Amazon’s mturk.com, select a job and start doing it, all through your web browser. Each task pays just a few cents but if you take on tricker tasks, you end up with a small supplementary income. Translation of foreign language audio to English text pays pretty well. After a year you might be able to buy yourself… something small.

I don’t know about you but I find this quite depressing. Read more at the mechanical turk monitor blog.

At the risk of turning this blog into another ‘Web Sites That Suck’ here’s a link to a typical posting at the Digital Photography Blog:New Nikon DSLR Coming Soon

This site is a fairly useful aggregator for material posted at other sites. They post a short summary of the article and then link to the original site.

The problem is that I can never find the link on the page that takes me offsite to the full article. (In the interest of full disclosure I would like to state that I am an idiot. And it’s this quality that leaves me uniquely qualified to comment on this kind of issue).

There are far too many links on the page. Or rather it appears that way because there is very little visual separation to indicate what is specific to the article and what’s generic links, adverts or site navigation. So I’m scanning through the muddle of similar text trying to spot something that might be the link to the actual article.

The reason I can’t find it is that they’ve chosen to link the article title itself to be the link. I’m expecting to find something underneath the summary not on top of the summary.

And no matter how many times I visit the site I can’t train myself to click on the article heading as every other blog I visit trains me to look for a link at the bottom.

One of my favourite bits of UI design advice (mainly because it annoys people that think they must be ‘creative’ in designing an interface) is ‘Do what everybody else is doing’. If you fail to heed this advice either because you think you know better or because you think you need to differentiate yourself on principle, then your visitors will have to continually re-learn the habits they’ve formed in the other 99.999% of the web.

[from OK/Cancel]. This has to be the geekiest thing in the world ever.