90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Providing a good UI for sorting and filtering search results key fundamental to making your long tail work.

Bill Scott (Director of UI Engineering at Netflix) wrote a post on this yesterday with lots of video clips and screen grabs. Nice post Bill! (& good comments too)

Also check out Theresa Neil’s post on The Ultra Rich Search Experience.

It’s a bit of a wild-west situation at the moment, with designers experimenting with lots of different design patterns, and users gradually learning about the “search, then progressively refine” interaction style. This is bound to change over the coming months.

Launched in early 2007, Buzzword is a web-based wordprocessor made using Adobe Flex / Flash. In terms of user experience, it craps all over Google Docs and the competition. I’m amazed I’ve only just heard about it.

Try Buzzword now.

I’ve just been doing a spot of reading about oAuth and thought I’d do a quick post on it. This was a hot topic back in October, so I seem to be rather late to the discussion - if you are too, read on…

“Giving your email account password to a social network site so they can look up your friends is the same thing as going to dinner and giving your atm card and pin code to the waiter when it’s time to pay. Any restaurant asking for your pin code will go out of business, but when it comes to the web, users put themselves at risk sharing the same private information. OAuth to the rescue.” [Excerpt from An end-user overview of oAuth by Eran Hammer-Lahav (Oct 2007)]

So, you might trust Facebook or Linked-in enough to give them your email username & password for their “friend finder” service, but would you trust absolutely anyone? Back in October, Shelfari (A social network site for books) got a lot of stick for doing something dodgy along these lines.

This demo video came out in December, but if you haven’t already seen it, you can watch this edited down version (without the warm-up chatter).

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Thermo is basically a tool for interaction designers (rather than developers), to bridge the gap between their photoshop mock-up and a fully interactive user-interface. The demo video implies that Thermo will make excellent prototypes for user testing, and then the UI can be completely re-used by the dev team with little or no tweaking.

Lets hope it lives up to its promises, because if it does, it will rock. No release date has yet been given.

Ajax Sliders are becoming an ‘in’ tool for filtering search results. They are also quite easy to do wrong if you’re not paying attention to the user experience.

Before you read on, check out Properazzi and try out the price sliders. Properazzi is going to be a fantastic web 2.0 property site, but right now it’s still young (launched in March 07) and suffers from a few UI teething problems.

So, here are three key user experience guidelines you should consider when designing Ajax sliders:

1. Immediacy

• Does your UI react immediately to user input?
• Does it feel fluid or ‘gluey’?
• If it feels gluey’, consider speeding it up by simplifying the feedback - for example just giving users the updated number of results, rather than the full list. See Amazon Diamond Search for an example of this in action.

2. Seamlessness

• Does your UI interrupt the user while they are tweaking the sliders? This should be avoided at all costs.
• If you can’t solve this problem, consider reverting to a form submit button instead of an Ajax approach.
• A good old-fashioned form experience beats a bad Ajax experience every time.

3. Granularity and accuracy

• Does the slider scale offer a sensible scale (max and min) for the context of use?
• Are the slider increments meaningful or abitrary? Realmap provides $50,000 increments, which is all you really need in the context of house-hunting. Properazzi, on the other hand, lets you select to prices to the individual dollar - who really needs to say that they are looking for houses in the price range of £401,768 to £543,312?

I’ve just discovered pagegangster - a very flashy Flash viewer for PDFs. You upload your PDF, in return pagegangster gives you a magazine-style UI where you can flip through pages, zoom, and do searches. it’s all very nifty looking.

While it’s a quick and cool looking way to get your content webified, it’s no replacement for a real website. I’m with Jakob Nielsen on this. Having said that, if you have a bunch of PDFs and you don’t have the time or resources to create a real site, pagegangster is a good solution.

This isn’t really hot news, but it was news to me when George Oates mentioned it in passing during her piece at Dconstruct 07.

In an age of curious-sounding Web-site names, “Flickr” came largely by accident. The domain owner of “flicker.com” wouldn’t sell, so Caterina suggested “Flickr,” which Butterfield says made the service stand out. “We always had to spell it out for people, which helped make it stick,” he notes.
[read more]

Unsurprisingly, correctly spelled domains get loads of hits from people who don’t know how to spell web 2.0 brand names, and assume that the correct spelling would be the right way to do it.

So if you mis-spell your brand name just for a bit of ‘web 2.0 distinctiveness’, are you really doing yourself any favours?

After all, just two weeks ago, Del.icio.us decided to make the switch to delicious.com. How very sensible.

These days when you see someone wondering down the street looking lost, chances are they don’t have a shop-bought map in their hands – it’s much more likely they have a scrappy looking print-out from a web-based route planner service. And chances are they are looking very lost.

Take Google Maps for example - the directions they give you are completely linear. If you mess up on one step, you are completely lost as none of the steps are relevant to you anymore. And the maps it gives you are equally hopeless, only showing you the happy route, with little detail of the areas you so desperately need if you get lost.

What I want when I ask for directions on Google Maps is a series of high quality A4 maps that show me the route AND the surrounding area.

It’s like that film American Werewolf in London - “Don’t stray from the path, lads. Whatever you do, don’t stray from the path!

Four good reasons for you:

1. This year it’s all about user experience design.
2. The conference is small and friendly enough to actually meet and get to know new people.
3. You actually stand to learn something useful since there are some great presenters and workshops.
4. It’s in Brighton, about 3 minute’s walks from the beach and right by the Pavillion gardens.

And three reasons to tell your boss:


5. Registration is really cheap
6. It’s commutable from london
7. It’s short - you’ll only be out of action for a day (or two if you do a workshop)

Hope to see you there!

Read more at dconstruct.org

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!