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

You may have noticed that Google changed their Advanced Search page eariler this month. The new version certainly is a lot tidier than the old one, which was a complete dogs dinner - take a look at a screen grab of the old version below, the green lines added to emphasise the layout issues.

So is the new version better? In a nutshell, it’s tidier but not much better.

Back in January, Stephen Turbek wrote an interesting article on Advanced Search interfaces. Among other things, he pointed out that after a search is performed on Google, the “advancedness” is lost. You get taken back to the standard search results page, with a few boolean operators thrown into the search box.

There’s a certain degree of arrogance in this behaviour - the user says, very explicitly “I want you to help me to do an advanced search”. Google replies “Hmm, sure, but what you really to do is learn how to use boolean operators like a pro. That way you can use our standard search page instead, see?”

In fact the entire advanced search page is designed to teach you how to manually construct boolean searches rather than to help you do an advanced search. Take a look at the contextual help tips, for example. If you click a “tip” link it tells you how to construct a standard search with boolean operators. So, you ask for help on one thing, and it tells you help on another.

To use an analogy, if a kid asked you for help riding a bike, you’d give them stabilizers. You wouldn’t start telling them about clutch control on a motorbike straight away. So why isn’t Google giving novice searchers any love, compared to Yahoo and their rather nice AJAX search assist tool?

… When you chuckle to yourself about drop-down menu items. I laughed to myself about this one eariler when buying tickets for Mavis Staples at the Brighton Dome. I ended up going for “Group Captain”.

You may have notice things have gone a bit quiet here recently. That’s because I’ve recently changed jobs, moving from Flow Interactive in London to Madgex in Brighton.

Although I haven’t been blogging, I’ve been sharing a lot of links on my link blog, via Google Reader. If you’re interested, you can subscribe to my link blog here. Even better, why not become my Google Reader friend? I’m harrybr@gmail.com, add me via gmail chat or follow these instructions.

According to this Article by Darren Waters, Nokia have started calling their devices “multimedia computers”.

This makes me laugh - can you actually imagine any normal person ever using that term? “Hey, can I borrow you multimedia computer to make a quick call?”

It really sums up the developer mindset that Nokia so badly need to shake off. While a technically accurate description, it’s never, ever going to catch on. Meanwhile Apple happily called their device an “iPhone”. By speaking the language of the end users, they’ve started permeating the english language like Coke, Hoover or Polaroid did. A much smarter move.

[Found via Putting people First]

Apparently this did the rounds last year but, like all great works of art, has a timeless quality. Found via Information Architecture Television.

Last week Clearleft announced that they are building a “revolutionary” new app, called Silverback. As a viral marketing tactic, they haven’t told anyone what it actually does, and have only released a rather lovely splash page. Well, I’ve clearly succumbed to their marketing, because here I am blogging about what I think it’s going to be.

Observation: the Silverback gorilla logo is wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.
Interpretation: maybe it’s something to do with analytics or at least some form of research.

Observation: guerilla sounds like gorilla, and nerdy research types (like me) recognise the phase “gorilla usability testing” as a bit of an in-joke.
Intepretation: maybe it’s a tool for usability research.

Observation: Clearleft is moving steadily into user experience. Last years DConstruct conference (organised primarily by Clearleft) was user experience themed. Andy Budd is doing a talk on guerilla user testing at the FOWD conferece this year, which is a substantial departure from his prior fare of CSS and web standards.
Interpretation: to do user experience design properly, you have to pair it with user experience research in an iterative process called User-Centred Design. This process is pretty well known and even has an ISO standard associated with it. With this in mind, it makes sense that Clearleft, moving along their current trajectory, might consider making an app for user research of some kind.

Reasons why I may be wrong:

• Clearleft refer Silverback as a desktop app, not a web app, which probably means no tracking / analytics.
• They say the application is for web designers, as opposed to website owners, managers, or any other likely culprits.
• They have a much stronger background in UI development and web standards than user research. So maybe I’m barking up completely the wrong tree.

You may have noticed that I’ve started using a new Wordpress theme. It’s still work in progress so if you notice any bugs (or have any suggestions), please do get in touch.

Thanks!

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.

An impressively awful dialog design from Dell. Bad on so many levels.