90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

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I like the way you can see the recurring pattern of a pristine design getting gradually tweaked and cluttered until it hits tipping point, then it gets redesigned and the cycle continues.

Source: WayBackWhenMachine. (Typo amended – thanks Hanford!)

Check out these initial sketches for the Scribd user interface. This is what they should look like: messy and conceptual. For some reason, a lot of people still don’t get this. Being able to draw is a bonus, not a requirement.

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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.

A while back I blogged about how Google was missing a trick with the name “froogle”. In short, its an in-joke that a lot of people just didn’t get (a pun combining “Google” with “frugal”), and didn’t even realise that clicking on would take them to google’s product search tool.

A few days ago Google switched to the altogether more obvious & comprehensible label “Products” and “Product Search”. Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products & User Experience blogged:

Today, we’re making some changes to how we help users find things to buy. You may be familiar with our product Froogle (a pun on “frugal”). Froogle offers a lot of great functionality and has helped many users find things to buy over the years, but the name caused confusion for some because it doesn’t clearly describe what the product does. [read full post]

I guess this is a bit of a boring post (“Don’t use incomprehensible labels” is a basic usability guideline), but the lesson here is that even for a user-centered company like Google, once a name becomes entrenched internally and gets attached to departments and job titles, it takes ages to change it.

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Another great deal from Three.

Check out the full size version of this sceen grab. Imagine you are planning on buying a new contract for your mobile phone. This deal looks good doesn’t it? 2000 minutes & 1000 SMS for only £25 a month, with a monthly not yearly contract – by UK standards that’s a truly amazing deal! So what’s the catch? In the small print it says these minutes can only be used at off peak times.

I don’t understand how anyone could see this as a good strategy. Sure, you may get a good sign up rate, but when the customers see their bills at the end of the month they are going to be seriously angry. I can only hope that this is a design mistake, not purposeful deceit.