90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Microsoft Surface is a pretty amazing piece of research: tabletop touchscreen computing done really well. But, the “origins” section on the Surface website strongly implies that the whole concept of tabletop computing originated from Microsoft. It didn’t. If you find this stuff exciting, you should check out some of the prior research in this area.

MERL’s diamond touch : one of the first multi-touch technologies (works by running an electronic signal to your finger via your chair to identify each user).

IPSI’s roomware: this is an entire room decked out as touchscreen surfaces that are all linked together.

Stanford’s Tabletop groupware: they’ve done tons of stuff in the area. You may recognise some of the gestural stuff that also appears in the MS video.

Jun Rekimoto’s work (Sony) this includes “holotable”, “smart skin” and “augmented surfaces”. Jun is a genius- in my opinion, his research is genre defining.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that Microsoft are building on top of prior research - this is, after all, what research is all about. I’m just trying to say that there are some talented people and research groups out there that also deserve recognition for the state of the art today.

Google’s new “website optimiser” is one of the biggest and most exciting user research tools to emerge on the scene in quite some time.

It’s a bit surprising, then, that hardly anyone in the User Centred Design field is talking about it. Perhaps it’s passed a lot people by – after all, it does have a rather bland name, it’s been released alongside Adwords (their advertising product), and the sales blurb says that it’s for “online marketers”, which is not a title normally associated with UCD.

Basically, Google Website Optimizer allows you to evolve your site using live user data. You give it a number of different page elements and it alternates between combinations of them on your live site. It gathers performance data (i.e. click-throughs) and you get a live report on which combination is the most successful.

It’s like natural selection- the good combinations win, the bad ones die, and you sit back and watch it all happen.

But it won’t solve all your design problems - it doesn’t compete with traditional UCD tools like lab-based user testing, participatory design and so on. Its place is at a very specific part of the design process, when you have some very specific questions to ask. Here’s a quick illustration:

A few months ago I did some user testing for a .com start-up who was focussing on achieving a huge number of sign-ups. We held 8 one-on-one user sessions on a prototype of their website. Afterwards we had some great findings. Users had real difficulties understanding the proposition of their service – it was just so new and weird, they have nothing to compare it to. Through a process of behavioural observation, interviewing and low-fi design exercises, we nailed down where the problems were and how to solve them. By the end of it we had a new tag line and step-by-step explanation of the service that most users grasped instantly.

This is something that Google Website Optimizer would not have been able to do. It can’t talk to your users to find out what they are thinking, and it can’t engage with them creatively. With Google Website Optimizer, all the richness of your customers’ needs, goals and expectancies gets left behind. All you get is some numeric data showing what they clicked.

Going back to the example scenario - by the end of the project debrief meeting we got to a point where many of the big issues had been dealt with, but lots of smaller issues started cropping up. Should the copy on the registration button read “Join” or “Sign up”? Should it have some associated copy like “No credit card needed” or “First month free”? What about the bullet points on the front page? We had 6 good ideas but we only had space for 3 bullet points, so which should we choose? You get the picture - we’d sorted out the big issues, but now we needed to finesse. This is exactly where Google Website Optimizer should come in.

In summary: it’s fantastic, but not a magic bullet. Consider it just another tool in your User-Centred Design toolbox.

I’ve been having a lot of fun doing out of box experience design consultancy over the last few weeks (OOBE as it is pretentiously called by those in the know). If you’ve ever opened an Apple product then you’ll know what an excellent out of box experience is; and, if you’ve ever opened a packaged copy of Windows Vista you’ll know what a bad out of box experience is. [See a nice comparison on Robert Hoekman’s blog, via Reaction.]

If you look around on the web, there isn’t much in the way of out-of-box design guidelines, with the notable exception of IBM’s offering. So I’ve put together a mini set of guidelines based on a metaphor of the bento box.

A bento box:

• Is a joy to use.
• Actively improves your perception of the contents, through attention to every minute detail.
• Encourages an order of consumption - the physical structure affords consumption of the top layer first. This is very useful if you need your user to do things in a certain order.
• Compartments are spacious enough to allow easy access to contents.
• Makes it just as easy to put things in as to take things out.

So next time you’re doing OOBE design with a bunch of non-UX people, introduce this metaphor to your team. It’s quick, it’s easy and it’ll give you a piece of common vocabulary to hang your ideas off.

I’m really interested to hear your comments - so please comment below! >>>

This is Luis von Ahn giving a Google TechTalk presentation about “human computation”.

He talks about Capatchas and the ESP game among other things. He’s particularly qualified to talk about them because he basically invented them.

Really interesting stuff. It’s been online for about year so this isn’t a very timely post, but it’s so worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. Enjoy!

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Think back to your first ever home inkjet printer. Mine was an Apple stylewriter in 1993.

Look at home printers today. They still look pretty much the same - they haven’t moved on much. Why not? We’ve been having the same gripes for more than 14 years now:

1. The feed area is not big enough for a ream of paper. Yet you always buy paper in a ream. You end up having to put that paper somewhere, why not IN the printer?
2. Paper in the feed area isn’t properly supported. After a week or two it starts to curl.
3. Some of the main parts are designed to slide-in and out. Implicit in this is the idea that you “put away” your printer when you are not using it. Who actually does this? It’s not worth the effort if you use your printer more than once a week. Plus the slidey bits often break.
4. You can’t place anything on top of the printer. Office printers may be chunky but at least you have a large output tray where you can leave a pile of print-outs without them getting in the way of anything.
5. And they are never shipped with a USB cable. It must have taken a special kind of evil genius to think of this and somehow manage to get almost every manufacturer in the world to comply.

It seems to me that home technology is usually considered the cheaper, flimsier sibling of office technology. This really shouldn’t be the case. Look at home furniture vs office furniture. Aesthetically, a lot more care goes into choosing it. Space-wise, the consumer is a lot more contrained, but this doesnt mean they want to always be putting things away and taking them out again. And in terms of durability, it may not have as much throughput but the usage it does get is likely to be intense (kids, teenagers, usage-while-eating, etc).

Home technology should be better looking, more compact and more foolproof than office technology. Will this ever happen for printers or will consumers always be motivated by the cheapest deal?

We’ve all had hardware like this in our home: designed to be an ornament yet attractive to nobody, and a waster of good surface space.

You can imagine how the designers pictured it - the user placing the device on a large, minimalist glask desk adorned by nothing but an Apple Mac, an executive pad and a single Cross fountain pen. The user sighs and says, “Wow, that really is a wonderful addition to my home office. Now it has a certain panache, I love it!”

The real world just isn’t like that.

In most homes, the situation is one of managed messiness. There is lots of solid research that indicates that some degree of untidyiness is actually very productive (See “The Social Life of Paper”, a lit review by Malcom Gladwell). When you leave things in an apparent mess, you are often leaving yourself signs and contextual cues of where you were in a particular task and its priority. You also tend to put things in places to remind yourself to do something in a timely and appropriate way. Like leaving letters to post by the front door, or an unpaid bill next to the telephone.

What enables us to do this is the surfaces of our homes. We’ve paid good money for them, and we deserve to pile as much mess on them as we want.

When will technology start getting designed to genuinely fit into our homes and our home lives?