90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

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.

There was a very funny tongue-in-cheek article on technorage by Charlie Brooker in Monday’s Guardian (21/01/08). Here’s an excerpt:

Recently, I was on a plane, sitting beside an 80-year-old woman who couldn’t comprehend how the in-flight entertainment system worked. It had a touch-screen monitor and an additional set of controls in the armrest. Thing is, she didn’t understand the difference between my armrest and hers. There I was, watching a movie in a bid to distract myself from the terror of being 30,000ft up in the sky, when she patted cluelessly at my controls and switched it off. I started it again. Then she hit my fast-forward button.

At this point, I politely explained what was going on and attempted to help her operate her system. She nodded and went “ooh” and “ahh”, but try as I might, she just didn’t get it. Ten minutes later, she stopped my film again, and kept doing so intermittently throughout the flight, sometimes switching my overhead light on for good measure, just to annoy me. Her screen, meanwhile, displayed nothing but the synopsis for an episode of Everybody Hates Chris, which she’d selected by accident but never played. She just sat there, staring at the synopsis for about three hours. I think she thought that was the entertainment.

Shamefully, I found myself starting to genuinely hate her - her doddering incompetence somehow rendered her less than human. Reverse the situation - put me in a 1940s household, say, and ask me to operate a mangle, and the chances are I’d earn her contempt with an equal display of ineptitude. But it isn’t the 1940s. It’s now. So snap out of it. Hit the right buttons or get left behind, you medieval dunce. Do you want the robots to take over? Because that’s what’ll happen if we don’t all keep up. How dare you jeopardise the human race like that. How dare you.

Read full article on Guardian Unlimited

Some passing thoughts:

Wouldn’t it be so useful if you could have group SMS conversations via a “reply to all” feature, just like you can with email? Imagine how much more profit the mobile operators could be making. What a lost opportunity!

By the way, if you like mulling over half-baked ideas, you should check out halfbakery.com. It used to be a favourite of mine a few years ago. Ideas on it tend to be quite fun in a brainstormy outside-the-box kind of way. Good for creative thinking.

Oh, and another thing about SMS. Did you know how ridiculously easy it is to send a spoofed SMS these days? It’s scary.

Some stunningly awful usage of the evil asterisk by three.co.uk for their X-series package (The UK mobile operator) -

Actually, if you dig into the Ts & Cs, the limit is 1GB a month. This is a big difference from unlimited, but not unreasonable since it’s an ok price. Why not just be honest and say it?

Actually, you have 5000 minutes of skype-to-skype calls. This isn’t bad, but they don’t make it clear that they mean skype calls only (no skype out, i.e. no calls to real phones included).

Actually, you have a hard limit of 10,000 messages a month. This is plenty, but by this point, you are likely to feel very suspicious of the asterisk. What’s silly here is that the X-Series package is a pretty nice deal by UK standards. There’s no need for all this cloak and dagger stuff. Good, honest simplicity would get them a lot further.

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.