90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

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

We all know that design influences people emotionally, but have you ever considered the possibility that possibility that design alone can actually influence the health of your users? This article by Steve Silberman on wired.com (August ‘09) discusses the psychology of tablet design and the placebo effect:

“[...] the placebo response is highly sensitive to cultural differences. Anthropologist Daniel Moerman found that Germans are high placebo reactors in trials of ulcer drugs but low in trials of drugs for hypertension—an undertreated condition in Germany, where many people pop pills for herzinsuffizienz, or low blood pressure. Moreover, a pill’s shape, size, branding, and price all influence its effects on the body. Soothing blue capsules make more effective tranquilizers than angry red ones, except among Italian men, for whom the color blue is associated with their national soccer team [...]“

Sadly, the information in the above box is presented, in typical wired.com style, without reference to any actual research. If you want to read more, you may want to check out Meaning, Medicine and the ‘Placebo Effect’, a book written by Daniel Moreman (the anthropologist mentioned in the quote).

→ Found via Hacker News.

This lovely image from a recent Erskine Labs blog post reminded me of the charmingly tragic story of the Sinclair C5.

Spurred on by his immense success in the computing industry with the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX spectrum, Clive Sinclair set his mind to electric vehicles. He drew up the Sinclair C5. Everything looked perfect on paper. The C5 was electric and complemented by pedal power, making it a low pollution vehicle, narrow enough to drive between cars in heavy traffic, like a bicycle.

To cut a long story short, Clive Sinclair woefully overestimated his ability to transfer his successes from the familiar computing industry to the completely unfamiliar electric vehicle industry. His assumptions about market needs were way out, and the practicalities of using a C5 in real life were far removed from the intended experience on the drawing board.

Being low on the road, C5s were hard to see from cars and were dangerous, exposing the rider to unpleasant exhaust fumes. In the UK, rain and wind made them horrible to use in the long winters (not to mention dorky looking!). The C5 had no gears and the seat was not adjustable, making it uncomfortable to use if you were particularly tall or short. The motor turned out to be under-specced, making it too weak to power the rider up many hills without pedal assistance. And instead of a steering wheel or handlebars, steering was controlled by small handles on either side of the driver’s waist, making first time usage awkward and ungainly.

The lesson here is that if Sinclair had conducted field trials prior to launch, most of these problems could probably have been overcome. At the very least, he could have discovered the product was going to be a flop at an early stage, and avoiding the need to haemorrhage vast sums of cash. In 1983, Clive Sinclair raised £12 million to finance Sinclair Vehicles. By 1985, they went into receivership, having only sold 12,000 C5s.

Hold this story close to your heart. Whenever you find yourself getting carried away with an idea in an unfamiliar domain, always ask yourself “Am I doing a C5 here?” After all, it’s easy to find out. A bit of contextual field research will set you straight.

Want to know more? Read the first two chapters of The Sinclair Story by Rodney Doyle (1985).

I think we all “get” simplicity these days, but nevertheless this quote from Paul Graham really sums it up:

It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You’d think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn’t sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they’re expressionists. It’s all evasion. Underneath the long words or the “expressive” brush strokes, there is not much going on, and that’s frightening.

When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

From Paul Graham’s article Taste For Makers (Feb 2002). Paul Graham is one of the partners at Y Combinator.

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?