90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

I’ve just finished setting up uxurls.com – a user experience aggregator. It’s a really simple popurls clone, intended for people who are too busy to set themselves up with their own RSS reader, or just fancy a quick glance at the sites I’m reading.

There’s about 130 sites on there right now and I’ll be adding progressively more in the next few weeks.

If you want your site added, feel free to drop me a line @uxurls, but I’m not making any promises. This site is really just intended as a way for me to share the sites I’m reading at the moment, and it’s definitely not intended as an exhaustive catalog of all things UX.

I hope you find it useful!

If you’ve played either of the recent Call of Duty “Modern Warfare” games, you’ll be aware of the disturbingly realistic air attacks you can carry out on other players.

Call of Duty 4 (Computer game):

It seems that the grainy monochrome footage is easy to mimic on an Xbox 360 or PS3. The first time I saw footage like this was on CNN during the first Gulf war. It was horrible. Today, most kids will associate footage like this with harmless play, massively dissociated from reality. I really recommend taking a look at both videos – the similarities are staggering.

Real life:

What you may not know is that modified Xbox 360 controllers are used to control millitary hardware in real life. This isn’t “new” news – wired ran an article on it back in 2008. Around that time, the British army ran an TV Ad that showed a soldier controlling a UAV (Unmanned Air Vehicle) using a modified Xbox 360 Controller.

Still from British Army TV ad

The army later confirmed that this was indeed real hardware, though, somewhat amusingly, were quick to point out that they had removed the Microsoft branding. There are some more examples of game console controlers used in the military here, here and here.

A spokesperson from Rayethon (An American defence system manufacturer – who make cruise missiles among other things) was quoted here as saying “We feel we have to take advantage of the fact that all the kids are growing up with video games”. In the same article, another system vendor was quoted as proudly stating “If you can use an Xbox, you can use this”.

I can’t imagine the games console designers being happy about their work being used in military applications. Still, there’s not much they can do about it. If it’s an effective control device that requires minimal training then it’s inevitably going to get appropriated.

More Xbox controllers in the millitary. Image credit: Popular Mechanics

Through the history of humanity, boys have played with toy spears and swords – I suppose this is just a natural continuation, and nothing out of the ordinary. What’s weird is that now, for the first time, technology has advanced to the point that allows us to design weapons of war that are almost indistinguishable in use from children’s toys. Stranger than fiction.

→ From Evan’s article Ten Rules for Web Startups (2005).
→ Found via InspireUX.com

Well, it’s almost 2010, so I’m going to pre-empt the glut of 2009 retrospectives by getting mine out there first.

In the past year I’ve written almost 100 posts on 90percentofeverything.com, and received over 400 comments. If there’s one thing that’s really motivated me to carry on doing this is the great comment ratio, so I owe you all a huge thanks for that! Even if you haven’t been commenting, I’ve been aware of your presence and that’s been a big boost too – this year the site’s had an average of 7,750 unique visitors a month, and roughly 3,500 RSS subscribers. Not bad for a niche interest blog which I write in the mornings before work!

So, here’s my list of top posts of 2009, based a rough combination of analytics data, comments and retweets:

1. Signup forms must die – here’s how we killed ours!
2. User experience research skirmishes – are you guilty?
3. Five UX antipatterns to avoid when designing Log-in & Registration areas
4. What You Need To Know About Eye Tracking
5. Screening out liars from your user research
6. “Just add an egg” – Usability, User Experience and Dramaturgy
7. Achieving adoption of a disruptive product
8. No rest for the wicked: a UX designer’s job is never done
9. The importance of setting accurate expectations
10. A quick UI review of browser malware warning pages
11. Bruce Archer, Hospital Equipment and the Origins of Design Research
12. Why conversion rate uplift percentages can be confusing
13. Cheap and Free Alternatives to Morae: Usability Testing Software
14. ROI is not just for businesses: how users make ROI judgements
15. The tricks that supermarkets play to stop you from comparing on price

If that doesn’t satisfy your desire for UX articles, check out the full list of all the posts I’ve ever written on 90percentofeverything.com (all the way back to 2005, yikes!). If that’s still not enough, why not subscribe to my new linkblog at 90poe.com.

I admit that Google’s new “fade in” feature is pleasant in a bland sort of way, and seems to be a good move from a branding point of view – but what interests me is that they claim their Multivariate testing research has actually shown measurable improvements in user behaviour “efficiency” over the old UI. It’s not entirely clear what they mean by efficiency, but this seems to be rather questionable. How is this going to improve my time-to-action if I want to check my gmail? How will it help me if I want to view maps, news, or visit any of the items that are initially hidden? By “efficiency” do they mean “time to start a search” at the expense of other actions? I can’t help wondering whether this is simply a move to enhance branding that’s been dressed up as the output of behavioural research. To look at it another way, perhaps this is actually evidence that the old school “data driven decision” mindset is starting to change at Google?

To quote Marissa Mayer on the official Google blog (emphasis added):

[...] in the end, the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.

If you like this article, why not subscribe to my linkblog over on 90poe.com?

You may have noticed that posts 90percentofeverything.com have dried a bit lately. This is mainly because I’m doing various other cool things, including working on some super-secret projects at Madgex, spending more time with my family, and watching my 18 month year old daughter become more awesome every day.

Anyway, I’d just like to assure you that this blog is still very much alive, but I plan to write fewer, more considered articles on it. I’m separating out my short linky posts onto a separate linkblog at 90poe.com and also tweeting them on @90poe. It’s intended to be the “baby brother” of 90percentofeverything.com.

If you’re already following me on Google Reader then you’re getting this content already – I just wanted to open it up to everyone else.

Many thanks for continuing to be a reader and commenter!