Pat’s Point of View

This year, WUD is on November 8th, and I’ll be manning the Step Two Designs booth at the Sydney event. If you have some time, drop in and say hello. There will be lots of interesting things going on, and at our booth we’ll have lots of information to give away, as well as a lucky dip prize. I hope my t-shirt fits this year :)

Here are all the details:

The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) has proclaimed that World Usability Day 2007 will take place on November 8, 2007. This year’s focus will be on healthcare. World Usability Day was founded in 2005 with a global mission to increase the public’s awareness of the need to make services and products easier to access and simpler to use. Universal issues such as healthcare, education and government will be addressed through expert forums, exhibits, events and initiatives in over 35 countries.

The UPA Sydney chapter is organising a local event, which will take place at Telstra on Level 4, 400 George Street, Sydney, from 9am - 5pm.

The November 8th event will feature an impressive lineup of speakers addressing the importance of usability across all aspects of healthcare. The program will include presentations on:

• The importance of customer experience to a large corporate (Holly Kramer, Group Managing Director, Telstra Product Management, Telstra)
• Advanced telemedicine - Accessing health services remotely (CSIRO)
• User experience design of a hospital-based managed healthcare service (Telstra)
• The risks of medical equipment failing and why usability is important (Moray & Agnew)
• The impact of poor usability on people’s lives (Objective Digital)
• Accessibility - opening a new world to disabled people (Scenario Seven)
• Usable website development process - NSW Guardianship Tribunal case study (Web Usability)
• Trustworthy technology - Privacy and identity in the healthcare industry (Edentiti)
• Design thinking and usability (Telstra)

The day will also include interactive sessions and demonstrations of techniques such as usability testing and eye tracking, and will provide ample time to chat with people in the field of usability to learn more about it.

You are invited to attend any part or all of the day, and no pre-registration is required. The event is free, and open to the public.

For details of the program, please visit the UPA Sydney website or the World Usability Day website and look for the Sydney event.

A special thanks to the sponsors for this year’s Sydney event:

• Telstra Corporation
• Boomworks
• CHISIG
• CSIRO
• Digital Tsunami
• Epilepsy Action Australia
• Objective Digital
• PTG Global
• Step Two Designs
• The Hiser Group

See what people are blogging about: WUD07, World Usability Day

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Please never say enterprise software again. I don’t really like enterprise software. Pretend you’re making consumer software. [...] Make software for people in big companies.

Jonathan Grubb (at CHI 2007)

So true. Engineers and techies who build the underlying system might need to think of the whole enterprise—in terms of performance, capacity, reliability—but when it comes to designing the functionality and interface, the people who will use it should be the focus.

Ironically, on the same day I thought about blogging this quote, I did observe a woman on my bus reading a memo entitled User Guide for Simplified Sign-on for XYZ Mainframe (or something to that effect). The memo was about six pages long, crammed with fairly dodgy looking annotated screenshots and quite a lot of instructions, with many bolded sentences.

I thought to myself, if it’s the ’simplified’ version then why does it need such lengthy explanation? By the look of that memo I would say it was far from simplified and far from anything I would want to roll out across a major financial institution (and yes, ‘XYZ’ is definitely a pseudonym in this case).

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Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path says—to paraphrase—that usability is a minimum requirement, not a suitable end-goal. Here’s a snippet:

…Legibility and visibility are the bare minimum of requirements for a successful piece of writing or a photograph. Any person who focused most of their efforts on legibility or visibility would probably have almost no chance of being a successful artist…No one tells their kids to aim for a C- and then expects them to get an A.

So, why oh why do people in this day age still hold up “usability” as something laudable in product and service design? Praising usability is like giving me a gold star for remembering that I have to put each leg in a different place in my pants to put them on. (Admittedly, I do give my 2 year old daughter a gold star for this but then she’s 2.) Usability is not a strategy for design success…Recently, I’m even coming to believe that focusing on usability is actually a path to failure…

The comments people have left regarding this post show that many of them took offence to what they thought Todd was saying.

Firstly, I think this points to quite a deep insecurity among ‘usability’ people. Secondly, I agree with Todd’s post, in so much as I have come across many organisations who have it in their head that they have to “do usability” and then everything will be alright. And I wrote about this in my post User-centred doesn’t equal success.

Among the comments are Todd’s efforts to better explain himself. I feel for him since I think I’m quite similar at times, blurting out quite a bald statement and having to explain myself. But honestly you would think readers of the AP blog (especially experienced practitioners) would be able to get what he was saying. Would anyone working at AP suggest usability isn’t something that should be taken seriously? Of course not, the point is that it’s not sufficient on it’s own. It should be a ‘given’, with the goal being to create something useful.

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Far be it from me to criticise a fellow usability person, but there’s something rather annoying about Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox emails: the subject line and content don’t match.

The subject line for the email relates to the latest Alertbox article, such as “Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers”. At the top of the email content there is a very short summary of the article and then a link to the full version on the website. All good, no complaints, well done.

The problem is that there’s much more in the email than just that. A few ads for conferences, books etc but then there’s some actual content. In the case of the latest Alertbox email we find “Is the end near for text-box ads?” and “Registration costs business”. These mini-articles are shown in full in the email and are generally a good read. I find that I end up reading those rather than clicking the link to the ‘main’ article. I’m sure there is a distinction between these two types of content from the authors point of view (I suspect the shorter bits are more like blog posts whereas the main articles are fully explored ideas) but from a user perspective, the content I read is not what the subject line promises. Add to this the tendency to skip over the very top of an email since that’s normally where ads sit or links for mailing list controls and/or metadata (who, when, where, unsubscribe links etc). Text banner blindness!

So would most people prefer to read inline content in an email or click through to a website? Somewhat ironically, Nielsen has written quite a bit about the area of email usability, but nothing specifically relating to inline vs linked. Scannability is important, which would favour summaries and links. And I suppose if there are graphs, charts or other diagrams in the article then a text email is not going to be very effective yet a page on the website will be. But I tend to stay within the application I’m using, especially if there are hundreds of emails awaiting my attention. I don’t want to have to click through to read the article, which means waiting for the browser to open etc.

Maybe it’s just me…

See what people are blogging about: email usability, subject line, Jakob Nielsen

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Yes, this is an unashamed rip-off of Jessica Hagy. Well it’s kinda more like an homage to her witty, insightful and very clever musings. I can, however, only ever hope to mimic her use of graphs and diagrams, rather than what she uses them to communicate.

The inspiration for this particular graph is the popularist rollercoaster which the web design industry can often be. Usability, user experience and then user-centred design; a succession of buzzwords that stirred clients and designers alike in to furious fits of corrective work. There’s no debating that at the heart of this movement was a genuine need for a shift in focus for many businesses and website owners (getting them out of the bottom left on the above graph). However, I’m sure we’ve all seen this bandwagon pick up speed at a frightening rate and career out of control. The net effect is that the herd mentality is now “we must do usability”. Blame the pundits for scaring us and blowing things out of proportion :)

For all the success stories (top right) there are still many examples of well-meaning and well executed projects that fall flat on their faces. Despite a user-centred approach, success does not always follow. A successful website (or business) does not necessarily require a devoted focus on user (or customer) goals, behaviours or attitudes. You mean we’re all deluded? Well, to use that old IA chestnut, “it depends”.

Think about how many products and services are a success even though when you take a long hard look (sometimes not even that long) you can’t find any evidence that users were considered at all. Remember the Motorola Razr? That phone is awful to use, nobody I know who has one likes it. But they still bought it, and I even know someone who bought another one after he broke the first one! As the old saying goes “there’s no accounting for taste”, but there’s also the fact that people don’t always behave logically. We buy and use things that suck, willingly and repeatedly (bottom right).

There are other more sneaky examples too, electrical and computer appliances are pretty much built as cheaply as possible as part of a strategy to shorten product lifecycles and increase replacement and upsell. This pretty much flies in the face of what consumers want, but overall that industry is a massive success. In this case we have little choice, and the manufacturers know this. There’s no need for user-centred design here, just marketing.

And the door swings the other way too. Massive amounts of time and money are invested into user-centred design projects to improve things like electricity bills, banner ads. But in the end none of that matters, the chance of success is low (top left). This is where usability versus usefulness can come into play (although it could be argued that it’s not really UCD if both are not taken into account).

All in all, this topic is an interesting antithesis to the usability hype. The fact that there are so many examples you could place in the bottom right (MySpace and YouTube would have to be the poster children of this corner) would seem to indicate that a balance of user-centred-ness along with everything else will give good results. Maybe even better results than a user-centred focus. This discussion could quickly wander into usability ROI, and none of us want to go there do we.

For my parting comment, I’d like to say I really like these graphs as communication tools, since you can easily map out several different factors and spark a discussion. Coming up with examples to plot on the graph can also be quite a challenge, as some of my examples illustrate…feel free to offer suggestions.

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On the weekend I found myself in a furniture store (as you do…once you’re married) and this particular store sells only sofas, which you can pretty much configure endlessly to match what you want. So there’s a huge number of options for width, height, length, arm size, arm style, cushion style, fabrics and feet. Fabulous flexibility.

This is good, right? Everybody wants options. Well what I’ve noticed (I’ve been in there more than a few times now) is that this confuses the hell out of customers. People spend literally hours in the store trying to play around with the configuration of their new sofa, locked in a verbal wrestle with the sales assistants. They sometimes comment that the poor girls working there get confused themselves and often don’t quote the same price twice. I’m not surprised, there’s too much choice!

Infinite flexibility leads to infinite options and a greatly reduced chance of the customer being able to make a decision–I mean this is the future of your home we’re talking about, a topic not to be taken lightly :)

Contrast this with your average furniture retailer. You walk in, they have this, this and this ‘model’ of sofa. Perhaps you can change the colour but that’s usually about it. You either like what they’ve got or you don’t. Sounds rather restrictive, but people buy stuff in this way day in and day out. They have a reduced set of choices, but are easily able to come to terms with those choices and can make a decision. Factor into this the weeks, if not months, of furniture shopping which husbands…err, I mean people, typically go through and the decision becomes even easier. Ahh, the power of apathy.

So I think this is yet another case of a business model based on what sounds like what people want, but the reality is that it’s diametrically opposed to what they really want once they’re in the shop. Possibly this would work better if it was done through a website that customers could interrogate with all conceivable combinations of options and get a price, as opposed to a human salesperson. Yet it’s still altogether too much choice, especially when you can go next door for the wham-bam-thank-you-maam shopping experience.

Counter-thought: perhaps this is only the case when shopping to a budget (which I always seem to be). If you had unlimited money to spend, then being able to just pick exactly the bits you wanted might work well. Trying to handle the complexity of the choices available and keep the finished sofa under a certain dollar figure, that’s hard. It means that rather than ‘following your heart’ and simply choose what you want, you end up going around in circles in an effort to find a balance between options and price.

Or maybe this whole problem exists because I’m a man; women probably have some genetic ability to handle infinite choice, like multi-tasking.

See what people are blogging about: furniture, choice, shopping behaviour

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Apple announces it’s new iPhone (iPod, mobile phone, palm-top). Too bad I’ve just recently got a new phone and new iPod.

It does look pretty darn nifty, especially the touch screen interface. It’s interesting that this final (?) version is quite different to the many different prototypes or suggestions that have been floating around for years.

The video demos on the site show the interface in action, but I wonder how well this would work in practice. That’s a hell of a lot of fairly complex functionality to squish into one device without any buttons. Most of their devices are quite usable, but lately the usability of Apple products has slipped a bit.

For example, my new 80GB iPod has a few surprises. Firstly the search functionality is new (or at least it wasn’t on my old one) and seems OK, but it might be pushing the limits of the controls (scroll ‘wheel’ and buttons) available.

Then there’s the fact you need to wake it up by pushing ‘menu’, on my old iPod you could just press play and keep going where you left off. The extra step is annoying, especially as the Apple logo that appears whilst it’s waking up is hard to spot and at first I thought it wasn’t doing anything at all.

Oh and then there’s this little gem: if a track has an artist but not an album, browsing by ‘artists’ doesn’t show the track! You can get to it by browsing through ’songs’ or by using the search though. For some reason I immediately started thinking this was because an SQL query buried in there somewhere joined the artist table with the album table in order to show the tracks for the artist in question. How geeky.

See what people are blogging about: iPhone, iPod, Apple

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Could youth be to blame for poor usability?

Those designing and creating things we use in our daily lives are generally quite young. This is certainly true of web design, but also in many other fields such as product design, architecture and most things artistic. Along with youth comes enthusiasm, creativity and the inspiration one finds as they begin down their own particular path in life. Excellent, without this many great ideas simply wouldn’t exist.

But it’s an inescapable truth that wisdom only comes through experience, so with the above qualities also comes impatience, brashness and let’s face it, a bit of a superiority complex. Young designers are unlikely to consider factors such as audience goals and the broader context (social responsibility?) in which the product of their skills will exist. And that’s fair enough, they’re focused on toning their technical skills and forging their own presence in the big wide world. So the ’soft’ aspects usually come in second place, if they even finish the race at all.

Conversely, if you look at the most respected and influential people in the [broad] user centred design community—such as Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Moggridge and some of the ‘web crew’ like Jeff Veen—they are all seasoned veterans. Most have moved through many different jobs in their careers and have accumulated broad experience that helps them with ‘holistic’ design. That’s not to say they are perfect and made no mistakes when they were young; indeed that’s precisely my point, they have. It’s only through the passing of time, and building of experience, that we gain the ability to design products and solutions whilst giving proper consideration to all aspects of the ‘problem space’. Those who stay in the game for the long-haul are all the better for it.

I don’t mean to stereotype everyone under a certain age as irresponsible and everyone over that age as supremely wise. And of course there are exceptions to any rule, but I think generally the hypothesis holds water. Most cases of poor usability occur because the person directly responsible hasn’t the experience to know better, rather than deliberate malpractice, evil corporations or lack of methodology.

And it does seem that innovation and creativity are more prevalent earlier in one’s career and a greater appreciation for context and usability come about later. There’s little doubt in my mind that a combination of both ends of the spectrum is crucial for a successful design endeavour. And when this requires two ‘types’ of people to work together to achieve the right combination, mutual respect and knowledge sharing are the key.

Which is why the current trend for experienced members of the Information Architecture and UCD community to want to leave the practise, is so potentially devastating. If we lose the experience we will be left unbalanced, as the field of web design was before we ‘discovered’ usability, HCI and all the other old school knowledge that are now key fixtures in any responsible designers arsenal.

See what people are blogging about: design, usability, youth vs experience

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about recruiting users (or I could don a lab coat and call them subjects) for usability testing.

I’ve spent the last year focused on intranets, which when it comes to this, are a breeze. You have a captive audience which can be defined quite well—in terms of job roles and information needs—through a bit of ethnographic research, they are usually close by and are usually quite happy to participate (if it comes to it you can always get their boss to make them do it…<evil laugh>).

Now, working on a website is a whole different ball game. There’s a lot of talk about usability testing—who to test, how many subjects, how to run the sessions—but not a lot on how to find a good source of representative subjects.

In the past, I’ve used two techniques when working on public projects: guerrilla style and external testing. By guerrilla (I just love that word) I mean low-cost, in-house testing where you make use of carefully selected colleagues/friends/family. At the other extreme we almost totally outsourced the recruitment and provision of test labs. Each is a valid technique, if applied appropriately, but both have obvious drawbacks.

Your client might already be in contact with key customers (such as in the case of B2B) and allow you access to their staff, but this is not that common for most projects, and more importantly, are these going to be representative users?

Probably the most popular method of recruitment is to use an external recruiter, normally a market research firm, who can get you subjects. Sometimes they even get you subjects you specify! But this is pretty bloody expensive.

A recent addition to the proverbial toolkit is Usability Exchange which makes it a bit easier by facilitating remote online sessions (specifically for accessibility). But remote testing of this nature has major drawbacks. It’s not surprising that it’s focus is on the more mechanical aspects of accessibility; so much of what you might learn from a one-on-one session is lost with this arrangement.

AGIMO have an interesting bit in their tookit on recruiting participants, although it doesn’t go into specifics. Some of their suggestions are interesting, and the list of pros and cons seems very sensible. Having never used some of these methods (such as cold calling or advertising in the newspaper) I’m not sure how practical they would would be, or how enthusiastic most clients would be to use them.

So it’s looking like the best approach is still to try a combination of methods that are suitable for the specific situation you find yourself in. No silver bullet here…or is there? Do you have a favoured technique for getting hold of usability testing subjects? C’mon let’s hear it.

(And this is just for your usual usability testing, what about cultural probes and other more ‘intrusive’ techniques? How do you find subjects for those?)

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Well, after piking early last night and going home, I had little trouble in getting to the 9 AM start in good shape, but I think others were a bit worse for wear :)

Today’s topics were less interesting than yesterday, but I found Julia Prior’s Technology Designers as Technology Users intriguing, especially considering my technical background. I also enjoyed Christos Katsanos‘ InfoScent Evaluator talk, although I don’t think that will ever be any better than a simple QA tool similar to an web accessibility validation tool. On the subject of accessibility it was good to hear Chris Law’s talk on the usability of accessibility guidelines for designers, except for the fact that he totally excluded web accessibility from his study (he had a reason but I’m not convinced it’s valid).

To wrap things up today, Bill Gaver gave an excellent keynote, which like the opening keynote, was very inspirational and had us all thinking how cool our work could be. But in reality most of us have much less freedom to do work we really want to do, even those with access to cushy research grants :)

His talk was a wonderful mix of interaction design, industrial design, ethnography, film-making and art. And I love the exploratory nature of his work; sniffing around life and seeing what things might be cool to build and play with. I particularly like the drift table, which I would happily place in my living room.

I think the things I have got out of this conference have been that there are lots of different people working in the rough area of HCI, taking many a different approach, and using different talents and skills. We all need to focus on what it is we are good at and want to do, then do it, then appreciate and utilise everyone else’s choice.

I also think we can all learn from one another too. For example, I readily admit that I don’t have a academic background and could certainly learn much theory behind the work I do. On the other hand I think the academy still needs to learn from industry and practitioners operating in commercial environments. One example of this is that a few of the academic presentations I saw lacked real-world credibility, they came across as nothing more than nice big terms for quite simple (but valid) techniques. Trying to pass off some research that involved observation and listening to people as something more than that, by giving it a fancy title, is not building any credibility in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, there are many researchers doing great stuff, but some need to drop the pretence, and stop looking down on practitioners who use the same methods without the name. (They could also learn to prepare more succinct and to-the-point presentations).

See what people are blogging about: ozchi 2006, hci, chisig

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