90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Imagine you are the benevolent leader of a small fictional country somewhere in the third world. Your resources are limited. While your country isn’t as poor as some other third world countries, many of your citizens can’t read or write, and some live in complete poverty. Much of the population lives in slums, and people are currently migrating in droves from rural areas to the city. Your country and the world around it is changing.

Since you are a nice leader and you care for your people, you want to start increasing your yearly spend on education (as well as healthcare and housing). Last month some Westerners in shiny suits came to visit and tried to talk you into buying OLPCs. Everyone else in your position seems to be buying them.

It seems like a good idea, but on the other hand, you can’t really afford them. Buying them would involve cutting back on other things. It’s a substantial decision. You firmly believe that computers and internet are the future, but are they the right thing for you to buy right now, with what little money you have?

And you suspect that the men in shiny suits don’t really know how things will pan out for the children of your country. You’re worried the OLPC might be a white elephant. It almost feels like a big experiment carried out by the west, but funded by you.

What do you do?

1. Blow your cash on a lot of OLPCs. Trust that teacher training and infrastructure will emerge organically, as a result of being ‘connected’.
2. Don’t buy any OLPCs yet. Instead spend the money on old-fashioned, unsexy stuff like teacher training, books, school buildings and blackboards. Then, watch what happens in other countries like yours that have adopted the OLPC. Perhaps in the mean time some alternatives will appear on the market.
3. or… something else? Your suggestions please!

Ajax Sliders are becoming an ‘in’ tool for filtering search results. They are also quite easy to do wrong if you’re not paying attention to the user experience.

Before you read on, check out Properazzi and try out the price sliders. Properazzi is going to be a fantastic web 2.0 property site, but right now it’s still young (launched in March 07) and suffers from a few UI teething problems.

So, here are three key user experience guidelines you should consider when designing Ajax sliders:

1. Immediacy

• Does your UI react immediately to user input?
• Does it feel fluid or ‘gluey’?
• If it feels gluey’, consider speeding it up by simplifying the feedback – for example just giving users the updated number of results, rather than the full list. See Amazon Diamond Search for an example of this in action.

2. Seamlessness

• Does your UI interrupt the user while they are tweaking the sliders? This should be avoided at all costs.
• If you can’t solve this problem, consider reverting to a form submit button instead of an Ajax approach.
• A good old-fashioned form experience beats a bad Ajax experience every time.

3. Granularity and accuracy

• Does the slider scale offer a sensible scale (max and min) for the context of use?
• Are the slider increments meaningful or abitrary? Realmap provides $50,000 increments, which is all you really need in the context of house-hunting. Properazzi, on the other hand, lets you select to prices to the individual dollar – who really needs to say that they are looking for houses in the price range of £401,768 to £543,312?

This is a pretty interesting presentation from Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s Executive Vice President (4/12/07). He says, fairly bluntly:

• Right now, the Nokia Handset User Experience has scope for improvement
• There are inconsistency problems between applications.
• Discoverability can be a problem (apps and content can feel ‘hidden’)
• Syncing and storage is currently difficult

Admitting there’s a problem, as they say, is the first step towards a cure. With a message like this coming from the top, we can expect some pretty radical improvements coming soon.

The iPhone isn’t mentioned, but I can’t help thinking that it’s spurred on a user-experience supremacy race. Great news for end-users.

| View | Upload your own

Imagine it’s 4.30pm on a weekday. Are you allowed to park here? if so, how long for?

This is a great example of disinformation design from Haringey council in North London. Because the council profits from poor information design, this sign is unlikely to ever get fixed.

Poor readability > parking mistake > £100 ticket > profit for council

I’m sure we’d all love to be in a position where bad design makes you MORE money. But of course that never happens on the web, does it? Or does it?

Coming soon – GUI whiteboard magnets from Eight Media in the Netherlands.

These look quite useful for collaborative wireframe sketching sessions in front of the whiteboard. I’ll definitely be ordering some.

I’ve recently rediscovered the IxDA.org discussion forum, and I feel compelled to do a post on it – not only is the actual content great, but the web-interface is really nice, keeping the posts tidy and making them a easy read (unlike email digest mode which is a mess).

If you want to be a lurker like me, try subscribing to the Threads RSS feed. This gives you an overview of the discussion topics, and links you through to the web interface if you want to read more.