Next month we have a slight twist to our meetups — Lynn Smith, local IA/IxD pro, will be presenting a demo of a very creative, non-facilitated “discount” usability test/heuristic evaluation, followed by open discussion about the methodology used, its rigor and validity — basically, “Is this a good way to gather feedback?” Lynn and her partners created an Axure prototype, sent out an email survey to 3 distinct audiences — UX practitioners, friends familiar with Zamby, and others not familiar with Zamby — and used the data to iterate the design and get another round of feedback. It was CHEAP and RAPID usability test at its best.

I anticipate a VERY lively, dynamic and rich discussion! Come share your thoughts and questions, and be prepared to be inspired!

Here are details of the meeting:

If you have questions, please feel free to contact either myself or Garrick (email@garrickvanburen.com).

Happy December!

Kristi Olson

http://www.kolson7.com

One of the oldest and most relevant user interfaces is the book. Books generally include page numbers, blocks of text and if you’re lucky, a built-in book marker. Generally you navigate a book in a consecutive manor via chapters or sections. What’s not to love about books?

Enter the dictionary

Webster and friends seem to have this notion that words need no relevance to a given subject. Your average book usually associate and gather paragraphs into a given chapter or section. It puts the sentences and words in a specific context. A sentence talking about love in one chapter may not have the same meaning when used in a different chapter.

In the case of dictionaries, contextualizing a word would benefit its usability and overall usage. If I had a dollar for every time I used a word out of context, I could be a venture capitalist. Grouping words that share a given context could benefit their use in speaking and writing. Our literature would be cleaner, concise and smart. Our verbal communication would make more sense and help communicate meaning effectively.

If it ain’t broke

I know, I know. Why fix the dictionary? So I ask, when was the last time you enjoyed readaing the dictionary? As far as usability for the dictionary, the process of actually reading it as both reference and literature is painful, if not unbearable. Also, the thesaurus is not much help in this regard. Words with the same meaning have equal chance of being used out of context.

The dictionary would be enjoyable if I could find words based on context and or subject. These subjects/contexts could include subject-matters, social situations, greetings, etc. Instead of it being a pile of word puke, it could be a tool that evolves with verbal and written communication. When someone uses the word “suck”, what is it communicating in a given context such as when someone fails a test or vacuuming a floor.

Conclusion

All in all dictionaries are nothing but tolerable. Words based on context would evolve our literature into something that all can understand and learn quickly. I’m not demoting the dictionary as relevant tool in and of itself, but its usefulness could be increased simply by grouping words into contexts. You’ll find that a lot of words overlap contexts. I’ll go as far as saying that the english syntax would be more succinct if it were all based on contexts. Viva la revolution for the dictionary!

I’m skimming through this as a prerequisite for a project. Some of it is good common sense. But there’s also some scary specifics in it. Some examples:

Guideline: Have several developers independently propose designs and use the best elements from
each design.

Ouch. Has that EVER worked? I’ve been in design firms that utilize that method, and have been in firms that use the broader ‘extreme design’ type of concept where a team work cooperatively. I always find the latter to provide a much more well-rounded, cohesive solution. To be fair, they seem to argue that this is a better method than one sole designer, which I’d agree with. But piecemeal group design is less effective than group design, IMHO. (And note that by group design I’m referring to a small team of design professionals…not design by committee, which is an entirely different beast).

Guideline: Design the Web site so it will work well with the most popular operating systems.

A bit misguided in that they already state one should design for the most popular browsers. This guidline should be wrapped into one statement: Design for browser and operating system agnosticism.

Guideline: Design for monitors with the screen resolution set at 1024×768 pixels.

Lots of problems with this, the two big ones being 1) Screen size does not equate to browser viewport size and 2) screens are getting bigger on the desk, and smaller in the hand.

Guideline: Present all major options on the homepage.

I think their intent was noble with this one, but ultimately, one needs to realize that a path of a few clicks is fine, provided that the path is obvious. And a clearly defined path can often be more valid than information overload on one screen.

Guideline: Limit the homepage to one screenful of information, if at all possible.

My main gripe with that one is that it contradicts the previous guideline.

All in all, the above are all rather minor nit-picks as overwhelming majority of the guidelines are sound advice. As with any guideline, folks will disagree on parts. For the most part, it’s a good (if a bit generic) read and there’s certainly a lot of nice citations in there to help with any argument one might have in the design process–especially when working on a .gov gig.

• fischer price fp3 player = headaches for dad
• how to cancel a myspace account
• how to delete all images on your sony cybershot
  

Which tells me that there is still a lot of frustrated folks out there dealing with modern UI and usability blunders. I’m not holding my breath, but let’s hope ’08 is more usable for all of us. ;o)

Also, I’ll do my best to get the new template/design/layout up and running. I’ve been lazy and we’ll do our best to get new look up soon! Happy new year!

Here’s the process I expected:

1. Click Membership in the top nav of Costco.com
2. Click on a ‘Renew Now’ button
3. Enter my membership number and a credit card number
4. Get back to work

Instead, they made it much more “engaging”:

1. Click Membership in the top nav of Costco.com
2. Create an “online” Costco account with a bunch of profile info they already have in my existing membership
3. Create a password. Such a bad idea, if passwords are to be meaningful, they need to be generated by the site – not the person.
4. Click ‘Renewal’ in the left-hand nave of the resulting page
5. Click the only option they offer me in the main page body
6. Then, they want me to guess how much my membership fee is (seriously). They know my membership number, they can just tell me.
   
7. After guessing a few times, I decided to call them
8. They were experiencing “heavier than expected call volumes” and my hold time would be 20 minutes.
9. I hung up, closed the browser window and got back to work

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to renewal anyway. They made it easy to decide.

“Nearly every other computer system refuses to recognize curse words, and, in effect, condescend to their users. Apple, by recognizing the reality of English discourse, exhibits respect for their customers.” – Peter Merholz

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/31/switched-on-apples-brash-flash-clash-rehash/

I find my mac loyalty waning as they become a bigger player in the world of consumer electronics. Has anyone noticed that Best Buy is now an Apple Authorized Reseller? I’m sure that has something to do with CompUSA closing half it’s stores, but I digress.

I was excited when I heard about the iPhone and although it’s way outside my budget and not really a necessity, I’d been thinking that an iPhone was in my future somewhere. Now that this Flash support issue has been a present for over a month and there’s some possibility it may not get resolved anytime soon, as a flash developer I’m thinking this may not be the phone for me.

Now I’d still tell you any day of the week that Apple is on so many levels, a better company then Adobe. Don’t even get me started about Microsoft. That said, I’ve got to start to consider what (from a Flash Developer’s perspective) is the best mobile device competing with the iPhone? Any thoughts?

As such, I ran across this article in Popular Mechanics: Bring Back Our Knobs: Analog vs. Digital. (* warning…audio plays on page load)

In reading it, I’ve realized that this has been perhaps one of the biggest subliminal complaints I’ve had with devices in general over the years. Most everything today is button-centric. Buttons, buttons, buttons. My car stereo, my TV/DVD/Satellite box, my cell phone, even our oven. Interfaces have become increasingly more tedious to use and the lack of the good, ol analog knob is likely the biggest culprit.

The article mentions that one of the reasons people like the iPod is that Apple, rightfully so, embraced the analog knob. The scroll wheel is a classic bit of interface design that people just intuitively like.

To take it a step further, I finally got to play with an iPhone yesterday. The appeal of the phone is that even though it’s entirely digital, the interface is highly analog. You slide your fingers across the screen to physically move the interface.

This, of course, can’t translate directly to web sites, as web sites are rarely interacted with directly. You typically are using an intermediary device such as a mouse or keyboard which can make using direct analog interface more of a chore.

That said, as devices get smaller and more ‘touchable’ let’s hope that other’s catch on to Apple’s ability to understand the power of analog in a digital world.

* = as an aside, you’ll note that when the page loads, it starts playing audio immediate. Yes, annoying, but interesting in that the audio that is playing is a direct reading of the article in podcast format. An interesting way to deliver the content.

So, I went to open one today and realized I don’t have the SNP viewer. So, I go to MS.com to download it and install it.

If you have never used a Macintosh, then you really can’t appreciate the ease of Apple’s drag-the-app-folder-to-your-computer-and-you’re-done installation process. For some inane reason, installing an application on Windows requires at least a half-dozen clicks. If you’re lucky, the half dozen dialogue boxes use the same interface and you just whip through clicking all the [OK] buttons. But once in a while you get this:

Exit Setup? Oh, I guess it’s done. Cool. Oops. It canceled the installation? WTF? Ugh. Install again.

I think I did this twice before stopping to try and figure out this mysterious dialog box. I finally got it. It was almost as satisfying as finishing the NYT Crossword. It’s cute that MS developers put these brain teasers into their applications to keep us on our toes. You’d never see Apple being that creative, would you? ;o)