90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

In The Power of Defaults Jeff Atwood nicks the title of an old Jakob Nielson post and weaves in some ideas of his own.

“For most users, the default value is the only value. Your choice of default values will have a profound impact on how your application is used.”

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on Jeff’s site recently. He should probably be in your list of RSS feeds (if you’ve got one - and why on earth wouldn’t you? You not still browsing the web like we did in the old days are you?)

P.S. The observant reader will notice that I didn’t actually quote Jeff quoting Jakob but why waste a snappy title.

Accessibility has won the political battle and web standards have won the hearts and minds of many developers and designers. Unfortunately usability is the poor relation which is a shame as it is by far the most important of the three.

I would like to add the qualification that I am a whole-hearted supported of accessibility. Hence the use of scare quotes as what actually gets implemented is usually a combination of token gesture, unquestioned myths and box-ticking. 80% of what’s actually useful for people with disabilities can be achieved by common sense, clean design and the application of basic usability principles.

Web standards - I’m talking about the followers of semantic purity and the ‘oh my god - there’s a HTML table in his code!’ Give me a practical benefit - your site works properly cross-browser, there’s genuine benefits in maintainability, the semantics are actually going to be used by someone other than yourself - and I’m a true believer too. But no - the web isn’t going to become onmiscient tomorrow because you’ve used a few cite tags in the right place…

Usability, on the other hand, benefits everyone who uses you site and it benefits them immediately in tangible ways.

Unfortunately it requires the occasional bit of testing which might involve talking to another human being which is rather more daunting than just skim reading W3C specs or WAI crib sheets.

According to Diggnation, Microsoft ran a number of focus groups for Office 2007 and asked people what new features they wanted Office to do. They gave a list of needs and nice-to-haves. Funnily enough, all of the requested functionality was in Office already, but nobody could find it because it’s all hidden away in the many-layered UI.

This is an important lesson - if your users can’t find a feature, it may as well not exist and you’ve wasted your time making it. The Ribbon menu has done a lot to fix this problem, since it only shows you the features relevant to what you are doing at that particular point in time.

If you check out the official iPhone site you will see that it declares:

“All the power and sophistication of the world’s most advanced operating system — OS X — is now available on a small, handheld device that gives you access to true desktop-class applications and software”

So unsurprisingly, many people have become pretty confused. You can imagine some people genuinely wondering if it will run the full versions of Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, or any of the other massive desktop apps they use. (Of course it wont).

So why didn’t Apple give the mobile version of their OS a slightly different name, like “Mobile OS X”? This way, instead of confusing people, they’d put across the message that it’s “Same, same but different“.

Touchscreens. Pockets. Keys. Big Fat Thumbs. These things haven’t managed to go together very well in the past … but have Apple managed to crack it with the iPhone?

The great thing about physical buttons is that they stay in the same place, and they have a “tactile landscape”. This means that if you are familiar with your phone, your hand can feel where the buttons are, and your motor memory can make using them feel “automatic”, a bit like riding a bike. The tactile landscape can help you do things while you are using your phone, like walking down a busy street and writing a text without bumping into anything. This makes your phone into a genuinely mobile device - something that you can use while moving, rather than just a portable device - something that you carry around but only use while stationary. [Ref]

This all seems fairly logical, right? So the question is, will the touchscreen on the Apple iPhone require too much visual attention? Will it be one of those devices you have to use while standing (or sitting) still?

Then comes the question of robustness. Apple tends to make devices that get scratched just by looking at them. I resent having to mollycoddle my ipod. I dread having to do the same with my phone. I don’t just want a phone that works with itunes and osx. I want a phone that’s compatible with my keys and my loose change.

But having said all this, when are they released in the UK? I badly want one!

The enchanted office

Microsoft using a comic to sell the benefits of the new Office UI brought home to me what a big event this is. This is going to affect more people than any other piece of interface design since (insert preferred choice of Windows 95/3.1/Mac OS (or Apple Lisa/Xerox thingie if you want to be a real curmudgeon)).

Am I exaggerating? Not sure myself but the amount of people who work with Office is much higher that the number of people that worked with GUI’s in any form back then and the change is fairly big. So maybe I’m not exaggerating…

According to this article on Yahoo! news, the OLPC “Sugar” UI has had absolutely no user testing carried out on it yet. Shameful stuff! I’ve also heard rumours that the UI design has taken place predominantly behind closed doors at Redhat. In other words, apparently no prototypes, mock-ups or even sketches have been put in front of any of the target user groups to ascertain whether the proposed features are either useful or usable.

I guess the folks on the design team haven’t heard the axiom “test early, test often”. This is surprising since it’s on pretty much the first page of every undergrad HCI / CS textbook under the sun.

The OLPC is a phenomenal piece of hardware, and has such worthy goals. It would be such a shame to find that it falls down on usability just because of lack of planning.

Imagine how wonderful it would be if mobile operators wrote these new years resolutions and promised to keep them. (It’s a complete fantasy of course, but there’s no harm in dreaming)

Stop making our customers choose their tariffs in advance for the next 18 months.
There’s a risk that customers might make the wrong decision and choose a tariff that is too high for them, and end up wasting money. Let’s stop taking advantage of our customers like this. In future, we will let our customers change tariff as and when they want. Even better, lets do it for them automatically depending on their level of phone usage each month. While we are at it, lets build smaller gaps between our tariff prices so that they always fit our customers’ needs perfectly.

Stop punishing our customers for going over their monthly quotas
The OFT recently ruled that UK banks can no longer give customers punitive charges when they go over their overdrafts. This is good – it’s just not right to punish your customers and profiteer out of their mistakes. In the new year, we are going to take the initiative and do the same for our customers – i.e. stop charging them silly money when they run over their quota for minutes, data, texts, or whatever.

Stop acting like Evil Genies
Evil Genies play with words so that what they promise seems to be one thing, but when delivered it is quite different. For example, sometimes we call things “unlimited” with a footnote in tiny writing that they are in fact limited, or sometimes when we display the monthly price of a package, we list the introductory price, which in fact only applies for 2 of the 18 months of the contract. We are going to stop doing this because it’s mean, and we want to be nice to our customers from now on.

Make quotas and charges very, very visible
From now on, customers will see their quotas displayed clearly on the home screen of their phones. This way, they can easily alter their usage so that they use their exact quota of minutes (etc), without wasting a drop. Also, we are going to display the data transfer prices / quotas very clearly within email and web browser applications, so users can easily monitor what they are spending. While abroad, these figures will change to accurately represent the prices.