90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Well, it’s almost 2010, so I’m going to pre-empt the glut of 2009 retrospectives by getting mine out there first.

In the past year I’ve written almost 100 posts on 90percentofeverything.com, and received over 400 comments. If there’s one thing that’s really motivated me to carry on doing this is the great comment ratio, so I owe you all a huge thanks for that! Even if you haven’t been commenting, I’ve been aware of your presence and that’s been a big boost too – this year the site’s had an average of 7,750 unique visitors a month, and roughly 3,500 RSS subscribers. Not bad for a niche interest blog which I write in the mornings before work!

So, here’s my list of top posts of 2009, based a rough combination of analytics data, comments and retweets:

1. Signup forms must die – here’s how we killed ours!
2. User experience research skirmishes – are you guilty?
3. Five UX antipatterns to avoid when designing Log-in & Registration areas
4. What You Need To Know About Eye Tracking
5. Screening out liars from your user research
6. “Just add an egg” – Usability, User Experience and Dramaturgy
7. Achieving adoption of a disruptive product
8. No rest for the wicked: a UX designer’s job is never done
9. The importance of setting accurate expectations
10. A quick UI review of browser malware warning pages
11. Bruce Archer, Hospital Equipment and the Origins of Design Research
12. Why conversion rate uplift percentages can be confusing
13. Cheap and Free Alternatives to Morae: Usability Testing Software
14. ROI is not just for businesses: how users make ROI judgements
15. The tricks that supermarkets play to stop you from comparing on price

If that doesn’t satisfy your desire for UX articles, check out the full list of all the posts I’ve ever written on 90percentofeverything.com (all the way back to 2005, yikes!). If that’s still not enough, why not subscribe to my new linkblog at 90poe.com.

I admit that Google’s new “fade in” feature is pleasant in a bland sort of way, and seems to be a good move from a branding point of view – but what interests me is that they claim their Multivariate testing research has actually shown measurable improvements in user behaviour “efficiency” over the old UI. It’s not entirely clear what they mean by efficiency, but this seems to be rather questionable. How is this going to improve my time-to-action if I want to check my gmail? How will it help me if I want to view maps, news, or visit any of the items that are initially hidden? By “efficiency” do they mean “time to start a search” at the expense of other actions? I can’t help wondering whether this is simply a move to enhance branding that’s been dressed up as the output of behavioural research. To look at it another way, perhaps this is actually evidence that the old school “data driven decision” mindset is starting to change at Google?

To quote Marissa Mayer on the official Google blog (emphasis added):

[...] in the end, the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.

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