90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

There was a very funny tongue-in-cheek article on technorage by Charlie Brooker in Monday’s Guardian (21/01/08). Here’s an excerpt:

Recently, I was on a plane, sitting beside an 80-year-old woman who couldn’t comprehend how the in-flight entertainment system worked. It had a touch-screen monitor and an additional set of controls in the armrest. Thing is, she didn’t understand the difference between my armrest and hers. There I was, watching a movie in a bid to distract myself from the terror of being 30,000ft up in the sky, when she patted cluelessly at my controls and switched it off. I started it again. Then she hit my fast-forward button.

At this point, I politely explained what was going on and attempted to help her operate her system. She nodded and went “ooh” and “ahh”, but try as I might, she just didn’t get it. Ten minutes later, she stopped my film again, and kept doing so intermittently throughout the flight, sometimes switching my overhead light on for good measure, just to annoy me. Her screen, meanwhile, displayed nothing but the synopsis for an episode of Everybody Hates Chris, which she’d selected by accident but never played. She just sat there, staring at the synopsis for about three hours. I think she thought that was the entertainment.

Shamefully, I found myself starting to genuinely hate her - her doddering incompetence somehow rendered her less than human. Reverse the situation - put me in a 1940s household, say, and ask me to operate a mangle, and the chances are I’d earn her contempt with an equal display of ineptitude. But it isn’t the 1940s. It’s now. So snap out of it. Hit the right buttons or get left behind, you medieval dunce. Do you want the robots to take over? Because that’s what’ll happen if we don’t all keep up. How dare you jeopardise the human race like that. How dare you.

Read full article on Guardian Unlimited

Some passing thoughts:

Wouldn’t it be so useful if you could have group SMS conversations via a “reply to all” feature, just like you can with email? Imagine how much more profit the mobile operators could be making. What a lost opportunity!

By the way, if you like mulling over half-baked ideas, you should check out halfbakery.com. It used to be a favourite of mine a few years ago. Ideas on it tend to be quite fun in a brainstormy outside-the-box kind of way. Good for creative thinking.

Oh, and another thing about SMS. Did you know how ridiculously easy it is to send a spoofed SMS these days? It’s scary.

Some stunningly awful usage of the evil asterisk by three.co.uk for their X-series package (The UK mobile operator) -

Actually, if you dig into the Ts & Cs, the limit is 1GB a month. This is a big difference from unlimited, but not unreasonable since it’s an ok price. Why not just be honest and say it?

Actually, you have 5000 minutes of skype-to-skype calls. This isn’t bad, but they don’t make it clear that they mean skype calls only (no skype out, i.e. no calls to real phones included).

Actually, you have a hard limit of 10,000 messages a month. This is plenty, but by this point, you are likely to feel very suspicious of the asterisk. What’s silly here is that the X-Series package is a pretty nice deal by UK standards. There’s no need for all this cloak and dagger stuff. Good, honest simplicity would get them a lot further.

Launched in early 2007, Buzzword is a web-based wordprocessor made using Adobe Flex / Flash. In terms of user experience, it craps all over Google Docs and the competition. I’m amazed I’ve only just heard about it.

Try Buzzword now.

I’ve just been doing a spot of reading about oAuth and thought I’d do a quick post on it. This was a hot topic back in October, so I seem to be rather late to the discussion - if you are too, read on…

“Giving your email account password to a social network site so they can look up your friends is the same thing as going to dinner and giving your atm card and pin code to the waiter when it’s time to pay. Any restaurant asking for your pin code will go out of business, but when it comes to the web, users put themselves at risk sharing the same private information. OAuth to the rescue.” [Excerpt from An end-user overview of oAuth by Eran Hammer-Lahav (Oct 2007)]

So, you might trust Facebook or Linked-in enough to give them your email username & password for their “friend finder” service, but would you trust absolutely anyone? Back in October, Shelfari (A social network site for books) got a lot of stick for doing something dodgy along these lines.

This demo video came out in December, but if you haven’t already seen it, you can watch this edited down version (without the warm-up chatter).

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Thermo is basically a tool for interaction designers (rather than developers), to bridge the gap between their photoshop mock-up and a fully interactive user-interface. The demo video implies that Thermo will make excellent prototypes for user testing, and then the UI can be completely re-used by the dev team with little or no tweaking.

Lets hope it lives up to its promises, because if it does, it will rock. No release date has yet been given.

I’ve been delivering a lot of User-Centred Design training lately at Flow, and I’ve noticed that when most people do paper UI sketching, they can’t help going “hi-fi”, and making very precise wireframes.

It’s just too easy to get sucked into the minutiae rather than maintaining a focus on the bigger picture. Plus, precise UI sketches can end up taking hours to make, so then when you begin the evaluation phase, the author is inevitably feeling defensive over their baby. And since the small details are present - the wording, layout, and so on - feedback then ends up focusing on it. You end up drilling further and further into the detail because it’s such a tempting, solid thing to talk about.

Instead of small details, this initial stage of design sketching should concern things like proposition (Does the overall idea seem useful?), concept (How does it deliver it’s value?) and context (Would it fit in with the other things the user is doing, e.g. before and after using it?)

This is where ‘boxing glove’ wireframing technique comes in. You don’t actually wear boxing gloves (sorry for the let-down), the idea is that you take measures to physically compel yourself to do very basic, very quick sketches. It’s a bit like Andy Budd’s idea of “one day design concepts“, but at a scale of minutes rather than days.

It’s simple:

1. Grab a big pad of post-it notes
2. Grab a felt tip pen
3. Sketch each page on a single post-it
4. Draw a single user-journey through the system. Concentrate on the ‘happy path’, i.e. ignore contingencies for now.
5. That’s it!

The constraints of the small paper makes it feel a bit like you’re wearing boxing gloves - it forces you to draw only the most crucial parts of the user interface. (If you want to use bigger paper, just use a fatter pen). This enables you to hammer through a user journey in a few minutes.

Another nice benefit is that this method invites participation in a way that finessed diagrams don’t - anyone can join in, no special skills necessary. If you’ve read Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences, you’ll know exactly what I’m getting at here.