90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

This is a great presentation by Jensen Harris, talking through the history of the MS Office UI and the design approach that brought about the ribbon. Contains nice shots of the early prototypes from slide 60 onwards.

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Read more about it on Jensen’s blog

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.

Some passing thoughts:

Wouldn’t it be so useful if you could have group SMS conversations via a “reply to all” feature, just like you can with email? Imagine how much more profit the mobile operators could be making. What a lost opportunity!

By the way, if you like mulling over half-baked ideas, you should check out halfbakery.com. It used to be a favourite of mine a few years ago. Ideas on it tend to be quite fun in a brainstormy outside-the-box kind of way. Good for creative thinking.

Oh, and another thing about SMS. Did you know how ridiculously easy it is to send a spoofed SMS these days? It’s scary.

Lifted. A funny short film from Pixar, with bad UI design featuring heavily in the plot.

Thanks to Andrew Harder for sending this one round…

I’m looking for a flight at the moment. I know the following:

• Where I’m going from (well I’d actually like to see results for all London airports listed in an order of my choosing)
• When I want to go (give or take a few days)

What I don’t want to specify:

• Destination - I want to scan the list of results and see what catches my eye
• Price - let me sort by price or set a ceiling though

If someone gave me to access to the underlying data I could figure this out in Excel or by writing a few lines of code but of course I have to access the data through various web interfaces. None of which give me the flexibility to search the way I want.

The main sticking point is destination. All the sites I try want this specified upfront. Am I the only person using the internet who knows they want a flight before they’ve picked a destination?

Dear laptopsdirect.co.uk,

 If you send out computers with the keyboard set to United States layout then my dad will never be able to type the @ symbol. Neither will my sister and she’s a librarian.

Dear shoppingtelly.com,

Please don’t take the blue color and underlining away from text links as my dad won’t realise he can click on them.

Dear tvguide.co.uk,

 Don’t hide the place the actual tv guide on your home page so it’s not visible without scrolling. My dad never thinks to scroll and clicked ‘back’ instead…

Jakob Nielsen has written about how most of the benefit of user testing is gained in the first few subjects. I can beat that.

 I suggest teaching your 65 year old father how to use the internet.

I’m coming up with enough material for a book here… To be continued.  

Having worked at 3 different User-Centred Design (UCD) consultancies in the last few years (Flow Interactive, Amberlight, and Oyster Partners), I can confidently say that the type of project most commonly requested by clients looks like this:

1. Client delivers test materials (e.g. prototype of new website)
2. 8-12 user test sessions are carried out by the UCD consultant (the client may watch a small number)
3. UCD consultant locks him/herself in a room, analyzes data and writes a report
4. Report is delivered in a debrief presentation to the client
5. Project ends, UCD consultant leaves and doesn’t get spoken to again for weeks or months.

It suddenly stuck me today how un-user-centred this method actually is. Sure, you get a cheaper project with a good number of users, but ultimately the consultant just throws their findings over the wall and hopes that their client catches them.

The amount of times I’ve seen a UCD consultant looking at the finished implementation months later, saying something like “Oh man! Didn’t those guys listen to the presentation?”

The problem is, the client stakeholders simply aren’t very engaged in this kind of project. Watching a few sessions just doesn’t cut it. Have you ever tried watching a series of user testing sessions? From a darkened room behind a 2-way mirror? The passiveness and repetitiveness can really send you off to sleep.

So how do you get the client stakeholders involved? The solution I’ve been using recently at Flow Interactive is Rapid Iterative User Testing. Put simply, you run design workshops between the test sessions. You talk to the client, you analyze the findings together and then, most importantly, as a group you tweak the design of the thing you’re testing. (Often the prototypes we test are UI mock-ups, so tweaking is a cinch).

Not only does it involve everyone and keep them interested during the test sessions, but it means that you get to make sure your design recommendations actually work in practice.

The main problem with this method is that it can cost more. More client stakeholders need to turn up, and the sessions may need to be spread over more days. But it hugely improves the output of the project. Instead of a report detailing the prototype’s failures, the final prototype that emerges from the testing is a living, tested implementation of your design recommendations.

Try it!