January 23, 2003
The Network and Paper use
"Despite predictions to the contrary, it doesn't seem that the advent of networked information sharing has reduced human consumption of paper."
Although I've managed to stop printing most things thanks to the network and the web, it is still true. I just love this quote. The full article is available here.
Centralizing the IA
Awhile back I attended User Interface East in Boston. There were many speakers there including Gerry McGovern, who has written extensively on content development and information architecture on the web.
One of the key things he has said is that because "information architecture is about organizing and presenting content, metadata and classification, navigation and search, layout and graphic design, it thrives on standards."
Case in point in a rough sample of folks at the conference, when shown a grid of a webpage and people are asked to place an X where the "Home" link would be, over a 100 people said it was in the upper left corner.
Another wonderful example that rings more bells in my interaction with non-web savvy content authors, is the naming of sections. Far too often folks want to come up with clever, cute names for things that don't mean anything to people. Could you imagine Grab Bag as a place you would go for Career Resources???
The truth is the web is about standards. The standards do not just include what the competition does, but what the entire web universe does. That concept extends to what sections are called and were folks look for media releases etc. Chances are companies that take user experience seriously have spent many hours and dollars researching what makes sense for users. Case in point amazon.com, travelocity, the list goes on. Those firms live and die by the ability of their users to intuitively understand the organization system and then be converted to paying customers.
The dot.com phase is over. I survived the dot bomb era. The web is now all about attract --> convert --> retain with users and that extends out to seemingly trivial things such as navigational nomenclature. Without that formula embedded in the user experience, the experience is not going to deliver on ROI.
January 21, 2003
Customer Experience -Travelocity's Take
Good Experience has a great interview with Travelocity's director of Customer Experience, Elizabeth Peaslee. Some of the issues discussed in her development of an experience team really ring true in my experience @ RHI, including the scenarios of doing sporadic user testing while gaining some very powerful insights on customer needs.
It's well worth the read.
January 20, 2003
Usability - Rapid Recruiting
One of the problems facing experience design in many large companies is the lack of usability testing early in the concept and design phase. All too often testing is put off or cancelled outright due to the complexity and cost. In many cases I have experienced this because it seems to upper management to be easier to push something live and then fix it later. The costs to this approach are very high on many plains — from a customer conversion to a development cost perspective.
The latest alertbox by Jakob Nielson, describes methodologies for doing usability testing rapidly, with few users, and minimal costs. Given this doctrine and the proven value of testing on ROI there really is no reason to not test before you build.
Some of the key rules to rapid testing include:
- Get representative users
- Ask them to perform representative tasks with the design
- Shut up and let the users do the talking
January 08, 2003
HTML as an Interative Wireframe tool
Most user experience designers do some form of prototyping in the form of wireframes to explore and demonstrate solutions to usability issues without having a polished design. The benefits to this process is the ability to rapidly test and modify experiences using paper or flat files without having to build working prototypes early on.
There is an interesting argument being made at Boxes and Arrows that presents an alternative view to using HTML as the tool of choice for wireframing. They claim the only reason they have heard why HTML is not an option for experience designers is that they are happy with the tools they are using. One thing to consider (which is what I have found) is that making wireframes using traditional paper prototyping tools prevents stakeholders from getting married to a particular layout due to the crude nature of the wireframe.
January 06, 2003
Uber Geekdom
If you grew up playing video games in the late 70's and early 80s at home you probably did so on either an Atari console machine or an early personal computer like an Apple //e .
In my trip down memory lane this weekend scanning photos from childhood and college I thought of all those hours supposedly "wasted" (according to my parents) playing video games and hacking on my Apple //. I can remember very fondly playing Dig Dug, Ultima I, Spy Hunter, and Karateka to all hours of the night.
I actually rue the day I gave away my Atari 2600, Apple //c and all the console games to my niece...never to be seen again. Well, it looks like I can have my cake and eat it too now, I got a hold of an Apple //e emulator for OS X and a few classic games. A few hours of gaming nostalgia await me this coming weekend.
Only a geek would be so proud.
January 05, 2003
We were never this young...were we?
(Pictured L to R: Joey, Art, Bob, and Pinto)
I just finished scanning 100+ photos over the weekend from the days when I was in college. While I was doing so, I ran accross this picture from my pledge "Road Trip to Hell" with Pinto. Man, we couldn't have been that young...could we? Time flies I guess.
Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability
One of the things I constantly battle in designing user experiences for the web is the desire by stakeholders to throw everything but the kitchen sink into a home page. This is the desire by stakeholders to give great amount of weight and importance to promotions that generally do not support the primary tasks they want users to perform on a site.
It is a delicate balance, but what we have found in usability studies is that users know what they are looking for when they get to a site. If they don't see it in the form of a link or context those users will not search for something that is buried.
On that very same vein, Jacob Nielsen just published his annual Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability. Although I am not a 100% Nielsen fan (he is a little to radical when it comes to the lack of graphics in design), he does make some good points that are worth considering -- "A company's homepage is its face to the world and the starting point for most user visits. Improving your homepage multiplies the entire website's business value, so following key guidelines for homepage usability is well worth the investment."
January 03, 2003
Deep Linking is Good Linking
Jacob Nielsen's useit.com recently posted a great article on the benefits of deep linking to content on a site in an effort to guide a user based upon their goals....
"Links that go directly to a site's interior pages enhance usability because, unlike generic links, they specifically relate to users' goals. Websites should
encourage deep linking and follow three guidelines to support its
users."