90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

I’ve been having a lot of fun doing out of box experience design consultancy over the last few weeks (OOBE as it is pretentiously called by those in the know). If you’ve ever opened an Apple product then you’ll know what an excellent out of box experience is; and, if you’ve ever opened a packaged copy of Windows Vista you’ll know what a bad out of box experience is. [See a nice comparison on Robert Hoekman’s blog, via Reaction.]

If you look around on the web, there isn’t much in the way of out-of-box design guidelines, with the notable exception of IBM’s offering. So I’ve put together a mini set of guidelines based on a metaphor of the bento box.

A bento box:

• Is a joy to use.
• Actively improves your perception of the contents, through attention to every minute detail.
• Encourages an order of consumption - the physical structure affords consumption of the top layer first. This is very useful if you need your user to do things in a certain order.
• Compartments are spacious enough to allow easy access to contents.
• Makes it just as easy to put things in as to take things out.

So next time you’re doing OOBE design with a bunch of non-UX people, introduce this metaphor to your team. It’s quick, it’s easy and it’ll give you a piece of common vocabulary to hang your ideas off.

I’m really interested to hear your comments - so please comment below! >>>

This is Luis von Ahn giving a Google TechTalk presentation about “human computation”.

He talks about Capatchas and the ESP game among other things. He’s particularly qualified to talk about them because he basically invented them.

Really interesting stuff. It’s been online for about year so this isn’t a very timely post, but it’s so worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. Enjoy!

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Snap’s “preview anywhere” mouse-over menus lately, and how they are a usability nightmare.

Well, I’d like to add my 2p by turning this discussion on its head and pointing out a couple of sites where mouse-over menus are done right (Amazon US & Yahoo), and how they’ve managed it.

On Amazon US, if you mouse-over the “See all 36 categories” tab, (or “Find Gifts”), a large menu pops-up. On Yahoo, something similar happens if you mouse-over the dynamic “mail / messenger / etc” area on the righthand side of the front page.

When you use these menus, they somehow “feel right”. They are different to the Snap Preview Anywhere menu, and all the other old school mouse-over menus that usability people everywhere have moaned about since the beginning of time.

So how come they are being done right? It seems to me that there are three main factors: (i) the delay, and (ii) the hit area and (iii) the context of use.

The delay needs to be long enough to distinguish an intentional “hover” (Scenario: user pauses cursor over the link and thinks “… I wonder what that is…”) from a mouse that happens to be flying by on its way somewhere else. But also, the delay needs to be short enough to happen before the user clicks the link or they move their mouse-away.

In the case of overlays (menus that cover up the content beneath), you need the menu to dissapear pretty quickly on mouse-out, since when users are done with the menu they want to get on with reading the site. This brings us onto hit areas. With small menus, if the user “wobbles” their mouse and accidentally moves the cursor outside of the hit area, the menu disappears while they are trying to read it, which is extremely frustrating.

Amazon avoids this problem by having a huge menu with a big gutter around the clickable items. This makes it easy to close the menu on purpose (a clear, purposeful push of the mouse outside of the hit area) and hard to close it by mistake.

Finally this brings us onto the context in which mouse-over menus are used. Mouse-over menus are a high prominence techique that should be used sparingly, and only for things that are likely to be very important to your users.

So, in conclusion, lets apply this framework to the Snap Preview Anywhere menu:

• The delay: interestingly, the default delay is set to 0.5 seconds which isn’t too bad- this doesn’t seem to be their problem.
• The hit area: is a small, awkward shape, making it easy to accidentally mouse out when you are moving your mouse from the hyperlink into the menu, or when trying to hit the controls (e.g. the “options” link) which are too near the sides.
• The context: the Snap Preview Anywhere menu is normally found all over a page like a bad rash, all it gives you is a low res, highly compressed screengrab of the linked-to page.

Here’s a little walkthrough of the Linked-in user experience:

1. When you register, it encourages you to add weak links to your network.
It does this by trying to get you to add your entire address book to join your network (as shown below). I don’t know about you, but many of the people I have in my address book are “weak links” – people I only sort-of-know.

2. Even if you dont fall for the trap, people you sort-of-know will.
So you end up with a mix of strong links (close friends and colleagues) and weak links (people you have met a couple of times, or have only ever had email contact with).

3. One of your contacts requests an introduction with someone you don’t know, but one of your weak links does.
Linked-in allows your contacts to request “an introduction” with not just people on your network, but people they know. So if you’ve never met Bill Gates, but one of your weak links knows him, another of your contacts could ask you to ask your weak link to introduce them.

4. You are given two options: “forward” or “decline”
This chain of vague association would probably make you feel a little awkward at this point. If you go ahead with it, you’d could find yourself saying “I know you don’t know me that well, but this other person I don’t know that well wants me to introduce you to someone you are linked to”. What if you don’t want to do this? Is there a polite way of getting out of this situation?

Basically linked-in shows you two buttons (as above), which force you to make a choice. The problem is that this is so black and white. You are either actively helping, or you are actively blocking. In a face-to-face conversation, you might change the subject, or be non-committal - “I’ll see what I can do”. The requester might then realise you don’t feel hugely comfortable about it and drop the subject. Also, with voicemail or email, one of your options is inaction. You can postpone indefinitely. Basically, in the “real world”, there are many shades of grey, and both parties have many options to avoid socially awkward interactions.

But in the Linked-in world, their system forces you into a direct confrontation. You can end up saying to yourself “I feel awkward about forwarding, I feel awkward about declining”

5. If you ignore the email, linked-in keeps hassling you
So Linked-in now sends you a reminder email again, and again, and again. How very, very annoying.

Here’s what Linked in should do to sort this mess out:

• Don’t allow people to add their entire Outlook contact list. If they must offer this feature, they should add a step where the user is encouraged to remove the weak links. Weak links dilute your network.
• Allow users to set their chain length. I personally would only want chains of 3 (a friend asks me to introduce them to another friend). Other users might be happy with 4.
• Don’t force direct confrontations: Allow people to gracefully ignore or “sidestep” thorny requests.
• One reminder email is enough. Two is nagging. three is ridiculous.

According to Diggnation, Microsoft ran a number of focus groups for Office 2007 and asked people what new features they wanted Office to do. They gave a list of needs and nice-to-haves. Funnily enough, all of the requested functionality was in Office already, but nobody could find it because it’s all hidden away in the many-layered UI.

This is an important lesson - if your users can’t find a feature, it may as well not exist and you’ve wasted your time making it. The Ribbon menu has done a lot to fix this problem, since it only shows you the features relevant to what you are doing at that particular point in time.

Touchscreens. Pockets. Keys. Big Fat Thumbs. These things haven’t managed to go together very well in the past … but have Apple managed to crack it with the iPhone?

The great thing about physical buttons is that they stay in the same place, and they have a “tactile landscape”. This means that if you are familiar with your phone, your hand can feel where the buttons are, and your motor memory can make using them feel “automatic”, a bit like riding a bike. The tactile landscape can help you do things while you are using your phone, like walking down a busy street and writing a text without bumping into anything. This makes your phone into a genuinely mobile device - something that you can use while moving, rather than just a portable device - something that you carry around but only use while stationary. [Ref]

This all seems fairly logical, right? So the question is, will the touchscreen on the Apple iPhone require too much visual attention? Will it be one of those devices you have to use while standing (or sitting) still?

Then comes the question of robustness. Apple tends to make devices that get scratched just by looking at them. I resent having to mollycoddle my ipod. I dread having to do the same with my phone. I don’t just want a phone that works with itunes and osx. I want a phone that’s compatible with my keys and my loose change.

But having said all this, when are they released in the UK? I badly want one!