90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Apparently this did the rounds last year but, like all great works of art, has a timeless quality. Found via Information Architecture Television.

Last week Clearleft announced that they are building a “revolutionary” new app, called Silverback. As a viral marketing tactic, they haven’t told anyone what it actually does, and have only released a rather lovely splash page. Well, I’ve clearly succumbed to their marketing, because here I am blogging about what I think it’s going to be.

Observation: the Silverback gorilla logo is wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.
Interpretation: maybe it’s something to do with analytics or at least some form of research.

Observation: guerilla sounds like gorilla, and nerdy research types (like me) recognise the phase “gorilla usability testing” as a bit of an in-joke.
Intepretation: maybe it’s a tool for usability research.

Observation: Clearleft is moving steadily into user experience. Last years DConstruct conference (organised primarily by Clearleft) was user experience themed. Andy Budd is doing a talk on guerilla user testing at the FOWD conferece this year, which is a substantial departure from his prior fare of CSS and web standards.
Interpretation: to do user experience design properly, you have to pair it with user experience research in an iterative process called User-Centred Design. This process is pretty well known and even has an ISO standard associated with it. With this in mind, it makes sense that Clearleft, moving along their current trajectory, might consider making an app for user research of some kind.

Reasons why I may be wrong:

• Clearleft refer Silverback as a desktop app, not a web app, which probably means no tracking / analytics.
• They say the application is for web designers, as opposed to website owners, managers, or any other likely culprits.
• They have a much stronger background in UI development and web standards than user research. So maybe I’m barking up completely the wrong tree.

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I’ve spent the last couple weeks choosing a high definition LCD TV, and in doing so I’ve been chatting to a lot of sales staff in different stores. Interestingly, a few have admitted to me that returns of HDTVs are quite common due to the picture quality.

Why? It’s because in most shops they demonstrate the TVs using high definition video. Most HDTVs look great when displaying HD video. The thing is, when you get the TV home, you are probably going to be watching standard definition most of the time. So for a normal person, the real test for an HDTV is to see how well it copes with standard definition.

Good HDTVs actively compensate for the poor resolution and video compression artefacts you get with standard definition content and make standard definition look a lot better than it really is (Digital freeview in the UK is particularly overcompressed). Bad HDTVs don’t do any of this, and can actually emphasise the shortcomings of standard definition.

Moral of the story: when choosing an HDTV, ask the sales assistant to switch the video feed to standard definition content, and look closely and the differences in quality between TVs. You’ll notice that on some of the cheaper sets the picture quality will become shockingly bad, while on the pricier sets, the picture quality is passable at standard definition.

An impressively awful dialog design from Dell. Bad on so many levels.