iterativelearning

A recent trip to the copy room got me thinking about Donald Norman’s usability classic The Design of Everyday Things (DOET). As one of the larger departments on campus, we’ve got an industrial-sized copier that sees pretty heavy use. Like most copiers at this level, they have all kinds of features and functions. One of these many functions is email (e.g., emailing copied documents to yourself or another person).

A couple of days ago, I happened to be in the copy room when a colleague asked if I could help him with this email feature. I was glad to help, but at the same time, mentioned to him that I rarely use this copier and have never used the email feature. Still, the interface was reasonably intuitive and as far as I could tell, it looked like he had correctly input all the necessary information. The only interface detail that seemed to be causing confusion was that the system hadn’t given him any visible confirmation of these correct inputs. More specifically, it hadn’t given him a confirmation message and so he didn’t know if the email had been sent. There was no signifier. So together we carefully searched the touch-screen interface for any hint that the email had been successfully sent, but to no avail. Pressed for time, he shrugged and moved on to more important things. As Norman illustrates in DOET, this type of user frustration is all too common.

So why didn’t the designers include a confirmation message? Did they look to Cooper and design for intermediates? Did they see this user scenario as equivalent to email? Obviously for heavily used interfaces, such as email, confirmation messages are redundant and unnecessary (and it’s got a “Sent” box if the user feels the slightest bit uncertain). But what about situations such as this, where a tool is used only sporadically at best? Does the novice muddle through or hope to find someone nearby who can tell him? Is there or should there be a quasi-decisive metric for including a confirmation message? 50% usage? 60%? Or should it be something simpler (e.g., if it has a Sent box, then no, but if it doesn’t, then yes)? Perhaps some help with this confirmation conundrum can be found with academic research databases in which there are definitely some that still include confirmation messages (i.e., for those instances in which a researcher wants to email article to him or herself). How do the designers of these research databases decide whether or not to include a confirmation message? Do they lean more towards Cooper or Norman?

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Cooper, Norman

In case Drupal fans missed it, last month, the modules page enjoyed a UI upgrade so that they’re now much easier to find. The Finder now appears prominently at the top-center of the main page. You can also restrict your searches by version. As a quick experiment, I ran a few sample searches for Version 6 modules (e.g., blog, calendar, wiki) and got a list of good, solid results.

Credit: Reintroducing Module Finder

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Drupal

I was placing a textbook order a while back and one of the drop-down menus seemed to present more confusion than necessary.

At first glance, the drop-down seemed to display the common alphabetical order (Astronomy … English … Philosophy); however, looking at it more closely, I noticed something rather curious. It used a kind of two-tiered alphabetical order where the word, Department functioned as a kind of prefix that was then followed by the specific department name (e.g., Dept of Economics, Dept of English, Dept of Linguistics).

In an ordinary alphabetical order, Engineering, of course, would precede English, however, in this drop-down, it appears before Engineering. In this configuration, English is linked to the Department prefix, while Engineering appears later because it’s devoid of that prefix.

While I’m guessing the rationale for this configuration is because most university org charts position English as a Department (e.g., inside the School of Arts & Sciences) and Engineering as a School, it still seems that a simple straightforward, alpha order would make it easier and more efficient. In terms of interface design and usability, this gets at the issue of a user’s expectations. Does the faculty placing the textbook order expect the drop-down to emulate their university’s org chart (assuming it does), or does she expect an ordinary alpha-sorted list?

In another line of the ongoing thread of discussion surrounding e-book readers, David Rothman at TeleRead responds to a piece by Christine Rosen. What I like about his post as well as Rosen’s is that they look at the question of concentration, namely, does an e-book reader undermine it, especially if it’s networked to the Web?

The role of concentration plays an important role in educational contexts, which is what grabs my interest. Anecdotally, what I hear from students is that they want good screen clarity that allows for sustained viewing (e.g., no eye strain or headaches) and the ability to annotate. There have certainly been progressions on the screen front, as well as on the annotation front. (Amazon’s Kindle is one device that has annotation capabilities even though it’s demo video doesn’t mention it.)

Going back to the Rothman post, most of what I’ve read to-date on e-book readers has been polemic: either the writer is for or against them. Taking a lead from Steve Krug, this seems like a prime opportunity for user testing, so that the conversation can be based less on ideology and more on actual user experiences.

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Krug, Tele-Read, e-book, Amazon

On the bus ride home today, I noticed a small poster behind the driver’s seat that announced upcoming changes to the arrival and departure times.

With time to kill, I thought a little about the usability and design of this list. Gripped with this momentary fever of design geekery, I dramatically concluded that it didn’t seem very likely that riders would look at this posted notice of changes nor even be aware of its existence; it would just be too hard to read from just about any seat on the bus unless a rider was sitting right next to it.

So, what’s a design geek to do? With a few free minutes before my stop, I brainstormed … What might be some options for improving usability? Hmmm… Perhaps,

• integrate these announced changes with the digital reader board that is used primarily for announcing the date and time as well as requested stops;
• add a pre-recorded announcement to run every _x_ minutes (the pre-recorded announcement could be customized so that it would be loaded on to the computer/PA systems of only those buses whose schedules were impacted)

The holidays are often that time of year when most of us have a little more time than usual to catch up on various movies we’ve been wanting to see. Like many out there, I’m a fan of Netflix. Especially if you don’t live in a city that offers lots of film options, Netflix works as a great opton.

One of the things that I think has helped Netflix’s success is how their website makes it very easy to search and add movies to a queue. Most of the time when I search for a film it’s because a friend or relative suggested it, and if I’m not too busy, I typically want to move it to the top of my queue while the conversation about it is still fresh in my mind.

In terms of usability, their bright, red button that appears immediately below the film title makes it a breeze, of course, to add to the queue; however, what about those times when you want to move it to the top of the queue? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do this as part of the same task sequence? As it is right now, you have to click the Queue tab, manually search for the title in your queue list, and then click the Top button — three additional steps!

There are at least a couple of ways they could simplify this. One would be to place a “Top of Queue” button adjacent to the “Add” button.” Theoretically, the Top button could allow users to complete two actions at once. Another option would be to place the button as part of a two-step sequence where the second step presents the option of moving the title to the top of the queue.

BuddyBuzz is described as the fastest way to read news on your cellphone. Created by the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, it gives you access to tech news luminaries such as Gizmodo, Boing Boing, Slashdot, Ross Mayfield as well as various others. You can also create your own collections with My Buzzbox, and upload and share articles. In Digg-like style, BuddyBuzz predicts the articles you’ll prefer based on how you’ve ranked previous articles. I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but in my first experiments, here are a few off-the-top impressions:

Pretty cool …
Clean, simple interface – after you activate it, the interface appears somewhat similar to a news ticker except instead of a horizontal stream that runs along the bottom of the screen, it simply displays one word at a time in quick succession. If you want to pause, then you simply hit the pause button.

Look Ma, no scrolling – one nice advantage to this simple word-stream is that it requires no scrolling; this can be a real advantage when you consider how reading news with the typical, small cellphone screen can be pretty scroll-heavy.

Perhaps, less than ideal …
Lack of speed control – because the word-stream moves at a pretty rapid clip, some users might prefer to adjust the speed settings and still feel like they’re getting all the speedy advantages that BuddyBuzz aims to deliver.

No visuals – one disadvantage of the simple, word-stream display is that you won’t see the graphs, images, or photos that would typically accompany a news piece (unless it’s hidden under some menu option that I didn’t see in my initial experiments with it). But maybe the BuddyBuzz creators figure that if speed is the primary draw, then visuals is something that users can easily and logically expect to do without.

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Ross Mayfield, BuddyBuzz, Stanford University, Persuasive Technology Lab

Jared Spool has a good interview with the Cooper GM, Kim Goodwin, on Excelling at Interaction Design. More specifically, they talk about what traits distinguish good designers from great ones. Catching my attention was one that can be so easily overlooked: active listening.

She urges designers to listen for the needs behind what’s being articulated by the client. For example, there can be this easy tendency to solve every problem by just saying, hey, let’s make it web-based.

Client: This ____ [solution] has to be web-based.

Designer: Why? What actually is the problem that you’re aiming to solve?.

A good designer uses active listening to encourage the client to think more openly and creatively about their problem and probes them with questions as to why they think specifically that a web-based solution would be the best response to their problem. Are there options outside of the web that would better address the unique characteristics of the design problem? Maybe a hybrid between the web and something else? This almost involuntary, uncritical inclination to see all solutions as web-based reminds me somewhat of the early days of instructional technology where overenthusiastic techie-teachers might inadvertently allow the technology to overrun the pedagogy.

Hardware like the MacBookPro and iPhone have begun to mainstream gesture interfaces.

I was kind of thinking about this at a recent visit to my regular bus stop. More specifically, while waiting for the bus to show up, I killed a little time by checking out the readerboard that displays all the different routes and corresponding arrival and departure times. As I looked at this, I started to think about how someone new to the bus system would decipher it. While the layout was pretty intuitive and logical, the font on the timetables and maps was very small; perhaps so small that a new, prospective rider would simply give up trying to figure out the best route to their destination. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could design these readerboards with gesture interfaces so people could zoom in on those parts of the map or timetables where they wanted more details? The bus system folks could look to CNN as their model.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybkidUnbjcE&hl=en&fs=1]

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Interface, iPhone, CNN

Interesting development in my WTW class … A couple of weeks back, I had my students do some informal usability testing of a wiki tool. Although, they identified some problems, a few of them mentioned, perhaps not surprisingly, that they would much rather use this tool as a forum for web authoring assignments than the common default (Dreamweaver). Why? It wasn’t just price, but it was also ease of use. This ease of use is one of the points that Stewart Mader emphasizes in his inspiring book, Wikipatterns.

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wiki, Mader