John McRee – UXD

This subject seems to be the topic of conversation here at EUI over the last couple of days. Ther have been a few articles floating around.

Leah Culver, web designer, developer, and entrepreneur likes Amazon’s sign-up/login all-in-one approach and riffs on it a bit. Though the comments both on the blog and here at EUI seem to suggest that the Amazon approach is a little jarring. Several folks wonder if we are at the point where the system can decide wether or not you are a returning or new user and take the appropriate course of action automagically.

Luke Wroblewski takes a look at the Mad Libs approach. If you remember, Mad Libs created narratives where the reader could fill in the blank. So the approach is a narrative one. They did some A/B testing that suggests that this approach increased traffic 25-40%.

But the science bums me out just a little. He throws this statement out there:

“While it’s possible these adjustments also contributed to the increase, it’s unlikely they were solely responsible for it.”

Well, they have reduced the number of visible fields from 9 (A) to 6 (B), and the white space created by those fields has been cut by about two thirds. That alone might be solely responsible for the increased adoption. What if you took format A and simply reduced the fields without adding all the narrative text in format B? would there be an even larger increase?

I really think it’s about the impression/perception of how much info I’ll need to provide. Version B reduces the cognitive overhead and perception of work in terms of space comprised of form fields, but increases it again even more than A by forcing me to read. I’d love to see them run better tests on this. Still, great work and a 25-40% increase is pretty awesome.

Juan Sanchez just turned me on to a recent TED video where Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos some outrageously thought provoking video of Bing Maps, Seadragon, and Photosynth integration. This is a really excellent example of digital convergence.

The video gets extra special cool when, in real time, there is somebody creating an augmented reality experience where they are taking video at street level and it is being perfectly superimposed over the on-screen view of the “map”.

There was an Alternate Reality Game a while back that had photographs of locations that were supposed to be from the future. Most of the photos showed little change, but a few of them foreshadowed some major events to come. I feel like I’ve just looked at one of those photos.

When we meet new clients and begin discussing the goals of the software project, there’s often a bit of education that has to take place. A frequent mistake that I see is when people confuse usability and user experience. It’s an easy mistake, but there are important distinctions that effect the design.

From their book “Interaction Design”, Preece, Rogers, and Sharp define Usability as being a multifaceted concept. Usability goals can be memorability, learnability, efficiency, safety, utility, or a combination of those. Some of those goals might even conflict somewhat. Some of the old command prompt interfaces are extremely efficient and very usable for expert users, but are almost totally unusable by new users who need the application to be more learnable.

They go on to define a separate set of experience goals that include satisfying, enjoyable, fun, entertaining, helpful, motivating, aesthetically pleasing, and supportive of creativity. These are a little bit more difficult to measure; they are subjective in nature. These describe how the user connects with the product at an emotional level.

How about the example of Mr. Usability himself Jakob Nielsen’s website? I know that he’s an easy target, but it takes only one look at his site useit.com to clearly understand that it is very usable, but the experience totally sucks. People CAN use it, but few WANT to. There is little difference between Nielsen’s site and the very first public HTML sites. Even though user expectations and desires have evolved, his site hasn’t.

So usability is not user experience. It is as important, maybe even more important than experience, but if you ignore the experience and focus solely on usability you might end up with something that nobody WANTS to use. At the first opportunity of a real alternative with a good experience, people will abandon the usable but unsatisfying, laborious, boring, unhelpful, demotivating, ugly, and/or non-creative experience for the better one.

Elements that create solid usability are easier to imitate without screaming rip to most people. A lot of usability is predicated on existing patterns. It’s user experience that needs more attention in order to differentiate your product.

Update: another example of a bad, yet usable experience coming out of the Usability field: Usability Professional Organization. Do usability experts hate visual design? They must!

One of the things I’ve been very happy about in newer web interfaces is that I don’t have to use a “Save” button. Google docs and GMail are good examples of these. The system backs up the changes I make while I’m making them – or at least frequently enough that I don’t feel compelled to use the save button. I like this a lot. It frees me from worry and from an additional step. Apple has also been using this for a while in system settings. You make a change to your system preferences and those changes are simply made. No saving involved. You aren’t doing anything that can’t be undone, so why worry about the additional step?

That’s why I was really surprised when I went to change my connected sites in Google Buzz and, completely ignoring the save button (like banner ad blindness, I guess I’ve become blind to save buttons as well?) I got an alert that prompted me to either lose the changes I made or go back to the previous screen and hit the save button. WHAT?

The changes I’m making here are simple and certainly aren’t permanent. The task is simply moving a finite number of items from one bucket (not connected) to another (connected). And rather than closing the dialog after making changes, I am forced to use the save button.

It’s really strange for Google, being outside of their general UI metaphor, and kind of a backward step in online applications.

Go back! In time.

Armando Roggio interviewed me about the book on ECommerce Developer. The audio cuts out because I’m pacing back and forth while speaking on the phone and evidently there’s a dead spot in the office. Still, the interview went well and Armando was very gracious. Check it out for some further discussion about topics in the book.

I’m going to be doing a workshop at the Government 2.0 Expo in Washington D.C. in May. I’m not sure what time slot, but I think that the workshop lasts 90 minutes! This is really exciting. I have so many ideas already, but if anyone has something that they would particularly like to work on, let me know.

Also, I’m going to be attending the Portals, Content, & Collaboration Summit held by Gartner in March. I’ll be hanging out by the EffectiveUI booth and answering questions. Come by and say hello.

Luke Wroblewski has a really nice write up of the new Apple store checkout process. There are some solid principals in paly here. It’s really nice to see a large company doing something that we have been trying to convince clients of for a little while. Although showing people Apple’s design and saying “here, look at how Apple does it.” is pretty trite. If it starts opening people up to better design, I’m all for it though.

I’m especially a fan of labels in fields. It can save a ton of space, and is even more directly contextual than a label above the field. The only drawback I see is that if somebody enters some information and somehow forgets the context. The context of the data the box contains might be lost. Sometimes. Maybe. Ah well, good job Apple. High five!

It’s prettier than I thought it would be. Holding the book in my hands is a little surreal. It’s not totally unlike seeing some software product you have worried and slaved over finally shipped in shrink wrap and sitting on a shelf. The more I think about it, the more excited I am.

I talked with Armando Roggio at Practical Ecommerce today about the purpose of the book and some of the ideas that are in it. He’ll be posting an article and even some audio about that discussion. E-commerce and online travel is where I cut my teeth as a designer. I think that there are a lot of parallels between application design and what needs to happen on an e-commerce site in order to achieve better user experience.

Check out the article, complete with an audio interview.

The book I co-authored EffectiveUI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software is going to ship on February 8th according to Amazon. As a person who is deeply prone to self-criticism and abasement, it’s always very difficult for me to decide wether or not my ideas matter to other people. Putting ideas down in a book that other people will pay for is totally contrary to my personality. But I kept thinking to myself throughout the process that, as long as I would want a client of mine to read the book before an engagement began, everything would be okay.

I would love for my clients to read this book. I believe in what’s in it, and I know first hand that the most successful projects I’ve been involved with have closely followed the patterns and strategies outlined in this book. Here’s the official blurb:

EffectiveUI today announced the release of “Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software,” a comprehensive and valuable resource for business and product managers trying to get innovative products funded and successfully built, software professionals struggling to advance the cause of better UX and anyone else who needs to effectively advocate for and deliver on the promise of higher-quality software.

O’Reilly Media, the technology industry’s leading provider of knowledge resources, published “Effective UI” as the latest in its series of educational books, services, magazines, research and conferences. The book is an informative guide to getting management support, employing successful product management strategies and and ensuring a management style that fosters a user-centered focus and collaborative environment, from working with the design and development teams to handling business and staffing needs.

Key Facts:

• “Effective UI” provides an overview of what UX is, what a good UX accomplishes and why engagement and a good UX matter.
• The book details how to win support for a better UX, educate key stakeholders and quantify the business value of a good UX.
• “Effective UI” addresses the problems inherent to traditional planning and project requirements and suggests alternative approaches to help elminate uncertainty and the unknown when developing software.
• This informative guide explores the importance of building and maintaining stakeholder buy-in throughout a software development project and offers tips for educating and communicating with stakeholders to solidify their support.
• The book recommends the ideal characteristics and composition of a successful project team, with special emphasis on the critical roles of stakeholders and the project leader.
• “Effective UI” suggests new approaches to how projects should be planned, designed and built and underscores the importance of restraint and user-centered design to reduce project risk and ensure high-quality results.
• The publication explains the importance and value of user research, key concepts underlying it, its goals and methodologies and how to combat pressures to skip this important step.
• “Effective UI” examines the initial product architecture stage of a software project — which includes UX and technical architecture — during which key foundational decisions are made.
• “Effective UI” explains how Agile methodology and iterative development concepts can be applied to the unified design and development of a product and highlights the importance of designers, developers, stakeholders and users actively collaborating during a product’s development.
• “The authors of “EffectiveUI” recommend a software-building approach that increases the final product’s usability and overall success while reducing pain, uncertainty and risk.
• “Effective UI” has the honor of being part of O’Reilly’s venerable animal series, which is well-known and respected in the software community. The animal on the cover is a Rainbow Lorikeet.

“Effective UI” was authored by Jonathan Anderson, John McRee and Robb Wilson.  The book retails for $44.99 and will be available for purchase at major retailers including Amazon.com and through O’Reilly Media at www.oreilly.com.