90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

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After all the beta testing - how did this one slip through the net?

When you browse videos in Vista Media Center it only shows you thumbnails with no text label whatsoever. (you do get a filename displayed when you hover over a particular item).

All my videos fade in from black. So I’m stuck browsing 30 black rectangles!

Microsoft. Reinventing Mystery Meat for the modern living room.

If you’re in the UK you may have seen this in The Guardian today, but if not - check out this this article by Charlie Brooker. A great takedown of the Samsung E900… As he puts it: “The whole thing is the visual equivalent of a moronic clip-art jumble sale poster designed in the dark by a myopic divorcee experiencing a freak biorhythmic high.”

Love his choice of words!

> Read the article

In this BusinessWeek article, Jakob Nielsen calls the OLPC UI design approach “reckless” because they have done no user testing so far. Meanwhile, John Maeda bizzarely praises process as “…the Steve Jobs method. […] You don’t use focus groups. You just do it right.”

You just do it right? …You just do it right? … That’s a little overconfident don’t you think? You are talking about children’s lives and huge chunks of the education budgets of governments that don’t have money to spare. And no self-respecting UCD practitioner would use focus groups in this context anyway. Imagine trying to explain the UI to a bunch of kids in a room. The only way to test it is to put it in the target environment, and look at the way it’s adopted.

What exactly would the UI designers have had to loose from doing a bit of field testing every month from the outset? They had everything to gain and nothing to loose. After all, the UI is hugely adventurous:

• There are no windows, all the applications run in “full screen mode”.
• On the “desktop”, you don’t just see icons of your own files, you can see icons of your friends, and you do thinks with them like chat, draw, browse the web or study together.
• There’s a special button on the keyboard that lets you view and (allegedly) edit the sourcecode of the program you are using at any time.

Innovation is a wonderful thing but you have to reality check: are these concepts really the best approach for the user requirements? And have they been implemented in the best possible way? They are making a lot of assumptions - it’s a big gamble.

I’ve yet to hear about the plans they have for releasing UI updates for the OLPC. Since when in the history of computing did version 1 of anything turn out to be the panacea of good design? At least when you buy version 1 of something, you know what you’re in for. The kids wont have a choice.

> Read BusinessWeek Article (”The face of the $100 laptop”)

My chum Mel works for a company called Headstar who - from the one’s I’ve met - seem like thoroughly decent chaps. They describe themselves thusly:

“Headstar is an independent publishing house and events organiser based in Brighton focused on technology and social issues. It publishes two free email newsletters,
the fortnightly E-Government Bulletin on electronic public services, and ‘e-democracy’ and the monthly E-Access Bulletin, on access to new technologies by people with impaired vision, although this is soon to expand its remit to all disabilities.”

Well they’ve decided to leap head first the exciting new world of blogging with their E-Access blog:
http://www.headstar.com/eablive

Go and say hello and say that I sent you.

Ok I acknowledge that I’m no security expert and this probably isn’t a major security risk, but do you recognize this scenario?

You’re on some two-bit website trying to log in. Maybe its a royalty free photo bank, maybe a discussion board, or some random online game.You’re in a hurry, not thinking too hard, and suddenly find you’ve tapped in the username and password for your email account, or - even worse - your work VPN. It comes up as “incorrect username / password” so then you go on to try another likely candidate - and then another again. By the end of it you’ve hammered in pretty much every username and password you’ve used in the last 10 years.

Have you ever considered the possibility that this site is storing all the rejected username and passwords? They may be storing them with or without nefarious purposes, but either way, it’s a genuine possibility. It seems reasonably possible that if you were a nasty person, this kind of list would be useful for a dictionary attack. I’d love to be enlightened by an expert on this stuff.

Password security seems to be primarily a human problem… I’m no expert but I’m really intrigued to read more about this…

The Help Desk (via My Confined Space - be warned some of the other stuff there isn’t particularly safe for work - or particularly good - but the video clip is a corker)

The Museum of Lost Interactions (via Boing Boing)

and finally - and with slightly more information content - How much control should our users have?

I’ve recently been talking to a number people about the “release early, release often” mantra. If you’re working on a new web app for the mass consumer market, be very wary. “Release early, release often” was written with open source software in mind.

If your first public release is too raw and too hard to use, there’s a risk of it not “going viral”. People won’t start shouting off the rooftops about it. The first blog posts and reviews that appear may have a negative tone, and this sort of thing is so hard to wash off in later releases.

In the open source community, people are keen to pitch in and help with the development in whatever way they can. They are tech savvy people who will put up with bugs, teething problems and constantly changing user-interfaces. They will happily give you their feedback and opinions - open source code is a worth cause. This is the world where the saying comes from.

If you are making a web app for the mass consumer market, “release early, release often” is dangerous. Sure, you want to get it out there and get some momentum, but first impressions count. In this day and age user-experience is one of the key differentiators between similar services. Also, your early adopters aren’t going to appreciate you forcing a poorly designed UI on them just because you were too tight to spend a bit more time and money in the design phase. Your early adopters are your nearest and dearest customers. They will make some effort and give some you feedback but you have to begin the relationship by giving them something that’s up to scratch.

So, throw away the old mantra, here’s what you should do:

• Involve users early, involve users often (do UCD!), but do it behind closed doors until you’ve got something you’re proud of.
• Cut back to a core set of functions, and concentrate on making them work well.
• Release to the public only when feedback from your test users is mainly positive.

I realise I may be preaching to the converted here - but if this article is helpful to just one or two people, then it was worth it …

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.

Joel Veitch is a minor media celebrity. He’s behind rathergood.com,a major contributer to the rather wonderful b3ta.com.

If you’ve seen the rather popular punk kittens clips - that’s him - and he’s done commercial work for Virgin, Channel 4, Switch, VH1 and others. He recently got ripped off and not credited for a Coke campaign in Argentina and there’s been a fair amount of publicity about it:

• BBC report
• Sky news clip

I’m glad he won but what I did find interesting is that the media failed to mention that he is fairly well known in certain circles and instead merely mentioned that he was the singer of an unsigned band and produced the relevant video at home on his PC. While this might be true it doesn’t paint the whole picture.

It doesn’t change the fact that he was ripped off and uncredited but ‘unsigned band ripped off by Coca-Cola’ isn’t as quite as good a story as ‘commercial video artist’s work ripped off by Coca-Cola’. I can see why a journalist prefers the first story and Joel himself might but it irks me that he didn’t get the publicity he deserves for the work that will probably turn out to be more influential than his band (sorry Joel - I might be wrong about that!).
I do wonder whether the Sky and BBC journalists were too lazy to google his name or whether they just didn’t want to spoil a good David and Goliath story.

postscript: Language Log has a bit of a vendetta going on about the BBC’s appalling standards of science journalism. I particularly hate bad science journalism because there’s rarely any good science journalism so I think this story needs a bit of a boost. I’d love to see the Beeb have to justify some of the crud they’ve been spreading.