90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Google’s new “website optimiser” is one of the biggest and most exciting user research tools to emerge on the scene in quite some time.

It’s a bit surprising, then, that hardly anyone in the User Centred Design field is talking about it. Perhaps it’s passed a lot people by – after all, it does have a rather bland name, it’s been released alongside Adwords (their advertising product), and the sales blurb says that it’s for “online marketers”, which is not a title normally associated with UCD.

Basically, Google Website Optimizer allows you to evolve your site using live user data. You give it a number of different page elements and it alternates between combinations of them on your live site. It gathers performance data (i.e. click-throughs) and you get a live report on which combination is the most successful.

It’s like natural selection- the good combinations win, the bad ones die, and you sit back and watch it all happen.

But it won’t solve all your design problems - it doesn’t compete with traditional UCD tools like lab-based user testing, participatory design and so on. Its place is at a very specific part of the design process, when you have some very specific questions to ask. Here’s a quick illustration:

A few months ago I did some user testing for a .com start-up who was focussing on achieving a huge number of sign-ups. We held 8 one-on-one user sessions on a prototype of their website. Afterwards we had some great findings. Users had real difficulties understanding the proposition of their service – it was just so new and weird, they have nothing to compare it to. Through a process of behavioural observation, interviewing and low-fi design exercises, we nailed down where the problems were and how to solve them. By the end of it we had a new tag line and step-by-step explanation of the service that most users grasped instantly.

This is something that Google Website Optimizer would not have been able to do. It can’t talk to your users to find out what they are thinking, and it can’t engage with them creatively. With Google Website Optimizer, all the richness of your customers’ needs, goals and expectancies gets left behind. All you get is some numeric data showing what they clicked.

Going back to the example scenario - by the end of the project debrief meeting we got to a point where many of the big issues had been dealt with, but lots of smaller issues started cropping up. Should the copy on the registration button read “Join” or “Sign up”? Should it have some associated copy like “No credit card needed” or “First month free”? What about the bullet points on the front page? We had 6 good ideas but we only had space for 3 bullet points, so which should we choose? You get the picture - we’d sorted out the big issues, but now we needed to finesse. This is exactly where Google Website Optimizer should come in.

In summary: it’s fantastic, but not a magic bullet. Consider it just another tool in your User-Centred Design toolbox.

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! >>>

Think back to your first ever home inkjet printer. Mine was an Apple stylewriter in 1993.

Look at home printers today. They still look pretty much the same - they haven’t moved on much. Why not? We’ve been having the same gripes for more than 14 years now:

1. The feed area is not big enough for a ream of paper. Yet you always buy paper in a ream. You end up having to put that paper somewhere, why not IN the printer?
2. Paper in the feed area isn’t properly supported. After a week or two it starts to curl.
3. Some of the main parts are designed to slide-in and out. Implicit in this is the idea that you “put away” your printer when you are not using it. Who actually does this? It’s not worth the effort if you use your printer more than once a week. Plus the slidey bits often break.
4. You can’t place anything on top of the printer. Office printers may be chunky but at least you have a large output tray where you can leave a pile of print-outs without them getting in the way of anything.
5. And they are never shipped with a USB cable. It must have taken a special kind of evil genius to think of this and somehow manage to get almost every manufacturer in the world to comply.

It seems to me that home technology is usually considered the cheaper, flimsier sibling of office technology. This really shouldn’t be the case. Look at home furniture vs office furniture. Aesthetically, a lot more care goes into choosing it. Space-wise, the consumer is a lot more contrained, but this doesnt mean they want to always be putting things away and taking them out again. And in terms of durability, it may not have as much throughput but the usage it does get is likely to be intense (kids, teenagers, usage-while-eating, etc).

Home technology should be better looking, more compact and more foolproof than office technology. Will this ever happen for printers or will consumers always be motivated by the cheapest deal?

We’ve all had hardware like this in our home: designed to be an ornament yet attractive to nobody, and a waster of good surface space.

You can imagine how the designers pictured it - the user placing the device on a large, minimalist glask desk adorned by nothing but an Apple Mac, an executive pad and a single Cross fountain pen. The user sighs and says, “Wow, that really is a wonderful addition to my home office. Now it has a certain panache, I love it!”

The real world just isn’t like that.

In most homes, the situation is one of managed messiness. There is lots of solid research that indicates that some degree of untidyiness is actually very productive (See “The Social Life of Paper”, a lit review by Malcom Gladwell). When you leave things in an apparent mess, you are often leaving yourself signs and contextual cues of where you were in a particular task and its priority. You also tend to put things in places to remind yourself to do something in a timely and appropriate way. Like leaving letters to post by the front door, or an unpaid bill next to the telephone.

What enables us to do this is the surfaces of our homes. We’ve paid good money for them, and we deserve to pile as much mess on them as we want.

When will technology start getting designed to genuinely fit into our homes and our home lives?

Dear Microsoft,

Sorry to not write directly but you don’t seem to have any address to send bug reports to.

I’ve been using Vista on my telly as a Media Center for a few weeks now and there are some really obvious bugs you might like to fix. I’d love you to let me know whether you already know about these but you don’t seem to want to share that information so I’ll have to assume you don’t.

1. The music library is still really slow if you’ve got a large music collection and really really slow if you have a large music collection shared over a LAN. Like - so slow you’d think your machine had locked up.

2. Seeing as Vista Media Center is meant to run on a TV at TV resolutions do you think you could get rid of that annoying ‘there is not enough room to display your start menu’ when I am running it on a TV?

3. There is no way to list browse videos by name. So I just get a screen full of black squares as my videos all start with a fade in from black.

(By the way what are videos doing in the same category is pictures rather than with TV or movies?)

4. Shuffled playlists seems to contain big chunks of repeated items.

(Oh please let me browse my music by folder! Please! My tags are a mess.)

5. Skipping tracks too fast keeps throwing up ‘an unknown audio error has occurred’

I’ll let you know what else I find. Thanks for being so interested!

regards,

Andy

PS I’ve found a horrific data loss bug in Windows Mobile but seeing as it’s been there for three versions now I think you probably know about it. Shame it killed a bunch of my files

I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor on my aging laptop the other day and after scanning my machine for a few minutes it gave me this wonderful feedback screen: [Blue speech bubbles added for emphasis]

Great stuff. Even though it may or may not work on my PC, it tells me that the business edition is a “good choice for my PC”. Better rush out and buy it then!

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Web 2.0 darlings 37signals. I used to read their ‘design not found‘ articles fairly avidly and even bought their excellent book ‘Defensive Design for the Web‘. Their sense of aesthetics is faultless and they put a lot of thought into making simple details of usability perfect.

So I finally tried out Basecamp - the project management web app.

And I must say I feel a little under-impressed. All the parts seem a bit separate. You can’t link messages to to-do list items or milestones or anything else. The only place where everything intertwingles is on the overview page and this appears as nothing much more fancy than a chronological list of changes.

I know the whole philosophy behind their apps is a about simplicity and avoiding featuritus but this harks back to the debate about simplicity that went on a few months back. Simplicity of use doesn’t imply absence of features and some well chosen additions to Basecamp could make it massively more useful.

It also implements one of my pet hate - plain text boxes that allows formatting via simple markup. I hate this in Wiki’s, I hate Textile and Markdown and all the others. Mainly because there *are* several and I can never remember the formatting rules.

Although web-based rich text editing is far from perfect I feel like I’m flung back to the stone age everytime I have to use markup on a site.

.

Another great deal from Three.

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.

I just paid my tax online (how fascinating) and was asked to take a quick survey. One of the questions was a ‘If so, then…’ type question. Of course I’d answered ‘no’ to the previous question so I skipped it. And of course I couldn’t submit the form without answering it.

I did another survey a few weeks back (I was procrastinating that day as well) and it assumed a few things about my job that weren’t true. As a result half the questions - which were again compulsory - were unanswerable. After a page or two of entering junk just to be allowed to go on to the next page I gave up.

The problem with the tax question was just silly but this is a much more subtle issue.

If you’re designing an online survey you’re obviously assuming respondants are fitting a certain profile and this will be reflected in the design of your questions.
If you get this wrong you’ll either be getting a high drop-out rate or people will fill in junk answers.

I’m apparently the CEO of a company called ‘N/A’. I’m sure there’s a few of us on the board…