90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

The debate about the ethics of opt in / opt out defaults in web forms never seems to go away. If you’ve read Chris Anderson’s Wired Article “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“, then you might know where I’m going with this: Ryanair.

To quote from the article: “how can a flight across the English Channel be cheaper than the cab ride to your hotel?

1. Cut costs: Ryanair boards and disembarks passengers from the tarmac to trim gate fees. The airline also negotiates lower access fees from less-popular airports eager for traffic.
2. Ramp up the ancillary fees: Ryanair charges for in-flight food and beverages; assesses extra fees for preboarding, checked baggage, and flying with an infant; collects a share of car rentals and hotel reservations booked through the Web site; charges marketers for in-flight advertising; and levies a credit-card handling fee for all ticket purchases.
3. Offset losses with higher fares: On popular travel days, the same flight can cost more than $100.”

Put simply, they are skating a fine line and have to work very hard on their upsell for ancillary fees (point 2 above). This boils down to the interaction design of their upsell page.

The way they do this is by alternating between default states of opt-in and opt-out for the choices on the upsell page. Easyjet also does the same thing. This is ethically dubious.

I can understand their argument for doing this. In their minds, travel insurance and priority boarding are highly desirable products and they preselect them to save the user effort. To them, it’s persuasive salesmanship: “We have a number of options here for you sir, but we highly recommend priority boarding and insurance.”

However, there is a dark side to this design decision. You could argue that rather than being persuasive, it’s just plain sneaky. How would you feel if, when doing your weekly grocery shopping at the supermarket, one of the staff sneaked something into your basket. You’d be free to take it out as it rolled along the conveyor belt, but only if you were paying attention. And an extra tin of beans with your groceries, or travel insurance with your flight is a small additional cost so it’s very likely to slip by unnoticed.

You could liken it to old-fashionned bazzar-style bartering, where people who have their wits about them will a get lower price. Personally, I’m not so sure. While it might be a grey area, one way or another it’s going to annoy some customers. In the Independent last saturday, James Daley referred to the purchase process on Ryanair as an “enraging experience”. Others agree.

Providing a good UI for sorting and filtering search results key fundamental to making your long tail work.

Bill Scott (Director of UI Engineering at Netflix) wrote a post on this yesterday with lots of video clips and screen grabs. Nice post Bill! (& good comments too)

Also check out Theresa Neil’s post on The Ultra Rich Search Experience.

It’s a bit of a wild-west situation at the moment, with designers experimenting with lots of different design patterns, and users gradually learning about the “search, then progressively refine” interaction style. This is bound to change over the coming months.

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?

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.

You may have noticed that a few people are blogging about Blendie right now - the blender that you growl at to make it go.

If you like the idea then try downloading Racing Pitch - a prototype PC game from Skinflake that works on the same principle. You make an engine noise into your microphone to make your car go. Your pitch determines your speed, and if you ‘accelerate’ too fast, you make your car skid.

It’s only a proof-of-concept but it’s quite fun, and when the novelty of playing it wears off, you can watch your friends making a fool out of themselves. All in the name of interaction design research!

I was flipping through Allan Cooper’s classic “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” just the other day, and I noticed how in one section he has a little rant about how calendaring software is broken.

“Many calendar programs are available […], yet every one of them ignores the most simple and obvious ways that people want to use calendars. Simply put, a calendar should reflect how people use time to manage their lives.” (Allan Cooper, 1998; longer excerpt here. )

Calendar software (like Google calendar & 30 boxes) has come a long way since he wrote that back in ‘98, but the event scheduling features seem to be focussed entirely on your work life. Also, although there’s lot of dedicated event promotion tools available (eventful, meetup, etc), they are very rigid and autocratic. The organizer says “The event’s on this date. Come, or don’t come”.

This works perfectly for big events, but what about small get-togethers? When a group of friends try and arrange a mutually suitable time and date for a get-together, the activity tends to involve a process of discussion and negotiation. This can require quite a lot of email / SMS/ phone call to-ing and fro-ing. What’s notable here is:

• Availability in your calendar is not the same as being free. Many people don’t want to keep their personal calendars up to date in the anally retentive manner we do at work.
• If you have a family, you often need to speak to them, and refer to their calendars first.
• We often need to be able to give “white lies” to get out of things. Tools that are too transparent will causes problems here.
• And above all, most people don’t want to run their personal social lives like they would their Outlook calendar at work.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but there seems to be a gap in the market here. I’m sure it could make a great Facebook app…

I was in Finland a few weeks ago, and this was the control panel of the lift in my hotel.

Imagine this scenario: you get in the hotel on the ground floor, you press a button, nothing happens. You try pressing all the buttons. Nothing happens. What are you meant to do to make the lift work?

In a way I kind of respect the designers who steadfastly stood by their beliefs in minimalist brushed metal aesthetics.

During my stay I watched a funny scene where a loud pair of American tourists completely floundered with it, while the reception staff pretended to ignore them.

Has anyone else noticed how great Facebook image tagging is?

Granted, it is only for putting names to faces, but it’s incredibly quick to use (say 5 seconds per photo), and it’s really satisfying. Your friends see you’ve tagged them (the images appear in their news feed on their facebook homepage), and usually respond with a comment or by tagging some of your photos in return.

Compare this to Flickr where image tagging feels heavyweight, tiring and you get no quick payback for your effort.

Come on Flickr - you’ve dropped the ball on tagging. It should be a rapid, social and fun activity!

Four good reasons for you:

1. This year it’s all about user experience design.
2. The conference is small and friendly enough to actually meet and get to know new people.
3. You actually stand to learn something useful since there are some great presenters and workshops.
4. It’s in Brighton, about 3 minute’s walks from the beach and right by the Pavillion gardens.

And three reasons to tell your boss:


5. Registration is really cheap
6. It’s commutable from london
7. It’s short - you’ll only be out of action for a day (or two if you do a workshop)

Hope to see you there!

Read more at dconstruct.org

Microsoft Surface is a pretty amazing piece of research: tabletop touchscreen computing done really well. But, the “origins” section on the Surface website strongly implies that the whole concept of tabletop computing originated from Microsoft. It didn’t. If you find this stuff exciting, you should check out some of the prior research in this area.

MERL’s diamond touch : one of the first multi-touch technologies (works by running an electronic signal to your finger via your chair to identify each user).

IPSI’s roomware: this is an entire room decked out as touchscreen surfaces that are all linked together.

Stanford’s Tabletop groupware: they’ve done tons of stuff in the area. You may recognise some of the gestural stuff that also appears in the MS video.

Jun Rekimoto’s work (Sony) this includes “holotable”, “smart skin” and “augmented surfaces”. Jun is a genius- in my opinion, his research is genre defining.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that Microsoft are building on top of prior research - this is, after all, what research is all about. I’m just trying to say that there are some talented people and research groups out there that also deserve recognition for the state of the art today.