iPhone shows that good design = good usability

TIME Magazine just crowned the iPhone as the best invention of 2007 (see Invention Of the Year: The iPhone).  I know what you're thinking, and I thought the same thing: can we please stop talking about the iPhone now?  Well, almost.  But let me just quote one thing from the article.  The author gives 5 reasons why the iPhone deserves this honor, and the first one is this (emphasis added by me):

The iPhone is pretty

Most high-tech companies don't take design seriously. They treat it as an afterthought. Window-dressing. But one of Jobs' basic insights about technology is that good design is actually as important as good technology. All the cool features in the world won't do you any good unless you can figure out how to use said features, and feel smart and attractive while doing it.

An example: look at what happens when you put the iPhone into "airplane" mode (i.e., no cell service, WiFi, etc.). A tiny little orange airplane zooms into the menu bar! Cute, you might say. But cute little touches like that are part of what makes the iPhone usable in a world of useless gadgets. It speaks your language. In the world of technology, surface really is depth.

I think Apple is showing us all the good usability can look great too.  They understand that it's not just about accomplishing your goal, but also about feeling "smart and attractive" in the process.  I think as usability professionals we often feel constrained by design, as if design stands in the way of making something truly usable.  Let's go beyond that -- let's keep the usability great and make it pretty...

Visualization of quantitative data -- bad examples

I'm a big fan of and RSS subscriber to Smashing Magazine -- they have some great articles on design, and I always find myself reading all the way through most of their posts.  With that said, I have to voice my disappointed in their recent article on chart and graph generators.  It's probably not even their fault really -- I applaud the hard work they did on pulling together a bunch of Flash, AJAX and CSS based chart generators that are available online.  But the fact is that most of these tools are completely useless unless you know how to visualize data properly, and that is, sadly, a skill that is not taught enough.

All of these tools create pretty flashy charts, that’s for sure, but does it really help to tell the story of the data?  Why would you ever need a donut chart or a 3D stacked cylinder chart?  What does that add to the data that a simple 2D bar chart can’t show you?

If you're not familiar with Edward Tufte's work, you should definitely check it out.  He coined the term "data-ink ratio", in which he argues, to quote from Wikipedia, "against the inclusion of any non-informative decoration in visual presentations of quantitative information and claims that ink should only be used to convey significant data and aid in its interpretation."  Below are some examples, from the Smashing Magazine article, of how "non-data ink" is so overbearing that it completely overshadows the data:

There are so many things wrong with these charts, but let me just point out the 3 main issues really briefly:

• Unnecessary usage of area.  The eye is not good at comparing the relative sizes of areas.  On the first graph, can you easily tell if France or Canada is bigger?  We are good at comparing lengths though, which is why bar charts are almost always a better option than pie charts.  (And by the way, what on earth is the hole for on that first chart?).
• Unnecessary and incorrect usage of color.  In the first chart, different colors are assigned to each country.  Since this should have been a bar chart and not a pie chart (as per my first point), different colors aren't needed, and just adds non-data ink to the graph.  If you're going to use color, then don't use highly saturated colors as in these graphs -- it's uneasy on the eyes and in many cases indistinguishable to people who are color blind.
• Unnecessary usage of 3D.  3D effects should just never be used, period.  It clutters up the charts, and also often results in occlusion -- where some data points are hidden behind others.

We need to teach analysts the techniques to create simple and straight-forward charts that let the data shine through.  All these primary colors and 3D stuff have nothing to do with the data.  A great resource on this is Stephen Few's book Show Me The Numbers -- I highly recommended his book to anyone who spends any time making charts for business presentations.  Ok.  I'm glad I got that off my chest...

Designing live concerts: U2 show how it's done

If you're a designer (or just into good design) and a music fan, I'd like to recommend the book U2 Show.  Despite the uninspired and nondescript title, this is a book about how the various U2 tours were designed -- from Boy all the way through Elevation.  The book explains the countless hours that go into stage design, lighting design, sound & speaker stack design, and a whole bunch of other areas (and it has some great photos too).  I really enjoyed the window this book provides into what goes into the design of a large rock concert, and it showed me again that basic principles of good design translate to all media forms.

Here are a couple of quotes from tour manager Willie Williams.  First, on how the PopMart tour came into being:

There was also a very direct (and very rare) brief to me that this tour would be ‘design-led’, rather than being intimidated by scale or logistics.  Having proved to themselves and to the world with ZooTV that, in terms of what can be toured, ‘anything is possible’, U2 were of a mind that the only limits to be placed on the creative ambitions of this tour were to be financial ones.

On the impossible design requirements given to the sound engineers:

Mark Fisher’s frustration with years of stage design constrained by traditional loudspeaker stacks led him to propose that we should keep the huge video screen free from clutter by placing the entire sound system in one central ball.  Most sound engineers would have resigned on the spot, but Joe O’Herlihy rose to the challenge of mixing a live show through what would essentially be a mono PA.

I like how they talk about the huge differences between the PopMart tour and the Elevation tour:

After the broad, churchy strokes of the Lovetown show and the sensory assault of Zoo TV and the garish, high-concept japery of PopMart, here are U2 playing their songs hard, straight and in your face.

It goes into detail on the simplicity of the Elevation stage and lighting design:

Video is not something that can simply be added to a show, a fact that is the downfall of many otherwise potentially interesting stage productions. We are so conditioned to look at television that moving camera pictures automatically become the focus of attention.

Because of this they went with what they call "Unmediated iMag", which means that the screens showing the band members will be static cameras, and showing everything in black-and-white to avoid distraction from what is happening on stage:

This proves once again what I have always believed to be the single most important purpose of visual design: to allow the content  to shine through elegantly, without distraction.  Pick up this book at Amazon if you're interested -- with more than just pretty pictures it brings a great design perspective to the enormous live concert industry.

Visual design clutter index for web pages

I'm currently working on a project where we're trying to come up with way to establish a visual design "clutter index."  The goal is to see if there is some threshold beyond which web page clutter impacts actual business metrics like conversion and click-through rates.  The challenges are widespread of course, and mainly focused on the following 3 areas:

• The definition and measurement of clutter.  There are a variety of ways to measure clutter on pages, ranging from the completely objective (e.g., % of white space on a page) to completely subjective (e.g., how do users rate the page on a clean vs. cluttered scale). 
• The definition of conversion.  Since some pages on an e-commerce web site are revenue-generating, and others aren't, an important question is how you define conversion.  For revenue-generating pages (e.g., pages with a "checkout now" button) this is easy -- did the page result in a sale.  For other pages, like product information pages, this measure won't work, so some other measure of engagement with the page becomes necessary.
• Controlling for other influencing factors.  In conjunction with to first 2 points comes the problem of causality vs. correlation.  Assuming you have your definitions of clutter and conversion nailed down, how can you be sure any changes you see in conversion is caused by clutter (causal relationship), and not some other factor you are not accounting for (there's correlation but no causal relationship).

The way to go about it is to take as many measurements of clutter as you can, throw it into a model with a variety of conversion metrics, and see what comes out.  You also have to find a way to account for other influencing factors so that you can control for that in your model.  Easy, right?  Ok, so there are a lot of open issues, but they're definitely not insurmountable.  I also believe it's a worthy pursuit, the hypothesis being that there are clear business reasons for keeping designs and interfaces simple. 

And apparently we're not the only ones thinking about this...  Ruth Rosenholtz and her colleagues at MIT recently wrote a paper (Measuring Visual Clutter) where they seem to have developed what they call a "clutter detector" for a variety of interfaces, mostly offline (desk clutter, map clutter, etc.).  They describe some of their challenges in doing this as follows:

The fact that one person's clutter is the next person's organized workspace makes it hard to come up with a universal measure of clutter. Rosenholtz and colleagues modeled what makes items in a display harder or easier to pick out. They used this model, which incorporates data on color, contrast and orientation, to come up with a software tool to measure visual clutter.

On the issue of subjective measures of clutter:

Although there was a fair bit of disagreement among the people being tested about what constituted clutter, when the researchers compared results from their clutter measure to those of their human subjects, they found a good correlation.

I'm still digesting the paper, but it's a fascinating read so definitely check it out.  Thoughts on how to approach this for e-commerce web pages are more than welcome by leaving a comment or emailing me at rian at ux-sa dot com.

Design as differentiator - what we can learn from Apple

There is a great article in Technology Review about how Apple uses design as a product differentiator.  You can read it here, but the web site requires registration - if you don't want to do that you can download a PDF version here.

Reading the article got me thinking about design as differentiator, and how we can learn from Apple and apply their success to other products.  The following principles stood out for me - the points are followed by direct quotes from the article:

1. Design focus has to come from the top.  It was largely [Steve Jobs] who established the company's emphasis on industrial design. Indeed, some would say that he made design a higher priority than technology.  Even in the early 1980s, [Mark] Rolston says, "Jobs wanted to elevate Apple by using design." Jobs, he says, not only cared personally about design but saw that it could be a way to differentiate his company's products from the PCs of the day, which often looked little evolved from hobbyist boxes. Ken Campbell, a codesigner of the Apple Lisa, was quoted in Kunkel's AppleDesign as saying that Jobs wanted Apple to be what Olivetti was in the 1970s: "an undisputed leader in industrial design."
2. Don't be limited by standard engineering requirements - push for innovation.  But Apple, Rolston says, "will change a whole factory's process." What's more, he adds, the company keeps its eyes open for new manufacturing possibilities, no matter how obscure. One example is the "double-shot" method of combining layers of different or different-colored materials. Apple "saw that a manufacturer had a special process for this on a small scale," Rolston says, and incorporated layered materials into its designs--for example, the clear plastic layered over colored materials in iPods and older iMacs. "[Apple] pushed them to do it on a much larger scale. Apple helped the manufacturers master the process and product."
3. Design innovation doesn't just happen automatically - it requires significant resources.  [Robert] Brunner estimates that today Apple spends 15 to 20 percent of its industrial-design time on concept--far more than most other computer companies--and the rest on implementation. He says that Apple rides herd on manufacturers, sending design-team members to factories for weeks at a time to see what can be done and to push manufacturers to find new solutions. If the designers see a true innovation, they can integrate it into their designs and check the quality of execution at the point of manufacture.
4. User experience needs a seat at the table from the very beginning of product development.  [Donald Norman explains:] "There were three evaluations required at the inception of a product idea: a marketing requirement ­document, an engineering requirement document, and a user-­experience document," Norman recalls. [Mark] Rolston elabo­rates: "Marketing is what people want; engineering is what we can do; user experience is 'Here's how people like to do things.'"  "These three [documents] would be reviewed by a committee of executives, and if approved, the design group would get a budget, and a team leader would be assigned," Norman says. At that point, he continues, "the team would work on expanding the three requirement documents, inserting plans on how they hoped to meet the marketing, engineering, and user-experience needs--figures for the release date, ad cycle, pricing details, and the like." And the team's progress would be continually reviewed as the project went forward.
5. Don't lose sight of the end product.  "Critical to Apple's success in design is the way Jobs brought focus and discipline to the product teams," ­Norman says. "[Jobs] had a single, cohesive image of the final product and would not allow any deviation, no matter how promising a new proposed feature appeared to be, no matter how much the team complained. Other companies are more democratic, listening to everyone's opinions, and the result is bloat and a lack of cohesion.

These principles placed design at the center of the product development process at Apple, and it is why their products are differentiated by being both beautiful and simple to use:

One direct result of that sharpened focus is Apple's unique ability to create simple products. Though the idea of a simple high-tech device seems counterintuitive (why not offer more functionality if you can?), it's worked for Apple.  "The hardest part of design, especially consumer electronics," says Norman, "is keeping features out." Simplicity, he says, is in itself a product differentiator, and pursuing it can lead to innovation.   Rolston agrees. "The most fundamental thing about Apple that's interesting to me," he says, "is that they're just as smart about what they don't do. Great products can be made more beautiful by omitting things."

And finally, on why design is such a powerful differentiator, I have to agree with one of Donald Norman's final quotes in the article, where he says that "Attractive things work better.  When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn't it? Or at least feels like it does."  

The trouble with computers (and Microsoft)

There is a very interesting article in The Economist about the many things that are wrong with computers today.  It's called The trouble with computers, and it starts by making some remarks about user interfaces and complex design:

Consider the Nokia 6680 mobile phone, says Adam Greenfield, an expert in computing culture at New York University [...]. He found that 13 clicks were needed to change its ringtone. “It's an interface designed by engineers for engineers,” he says. Steven Kyffin, a senior researcher at Philips, a consumer-electronics giant based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, concedes that computer programmers and engineers, himself included, are often guilty of designing complicated systems packed with too many features. “We're compelled by complexity,” Mr Kyffin says. “There's a point where humanity just can't handle it.”

And this statement then gets right to the heart of the problem:

Part of the problem is that programmers have traditionally had more power than designers. Programmers put in place the myriad features they want; interface designers then struggle to wrap them all up in a product that is simple to use. The results, all too often, are clunky interfaces.

Now, what bugs me is how Microsoft is claiming to be on the forefront of a movement to give designers more power:

Ken Wood, deputy director of Microsoft's research laboratory in Cambridge, England, says his company is putting greater emphasis on interface design. Three years ago, he says, none of his lab's budget was earmarked for pure HCI [Human-Computer Interaction] research. Today, a quarter of the lab's budget goes on it.

They may spend money on it, but the company's products are clearly show that in most cases decision-making still doesn't sit with designers.  There are so many examples -- like the superficial bells-and-whistles changes in the new version of Excel, without any real improvements to areas that desperately need it like the graphing engine.  What I find even more troubling is how the Vista operating system is being showcased as a product that exemplifies good design:

Andrew Herbert, managing director of Microsoft's Cambridge laboratory, told attendees [of HCI 2020] that interface simplification is vital if the computing world is to be opened up to new consumers such as the elderly, children and people with little computer experience. Microsoft says new features in its Windows Vista operating system, such as 3-D graphics intended to make navigation easier, demonstrate its commitment to greater ease of use.

Um... has anyone used Vista lately?  I would love to see the research that shows that 3-D graphics make navigation easier.  The truth is that it simply doesn't -- especially not in the clunky way Vista implements it.  How would adding a 3rd dimension onto a 2-dimensional screen create an easier interface?  If you can't get the design right in 2 dimensions, a 3rd one isn't going to fix the problem.  It might look cool, but it doesn't help you much.  At least The Economist picked up on that:

But tweaking an existing window-based interface is hardly a radical step.

Discussing the future of computing, the article concludes:

Many futurists and computer experts believe that the logical conclusion of all of these new input devices, sensors and smarter software to anticipate users' needs, will be for computing to blend into the background. In this “ubiquitous computing” model, computers will no longer be things people use explicitly, any more than they “use” electricity when turning on a light or a radio. Mr Greenfield says a digital “dream world” that provides “one seamless experience of being immersed in information” hinges on one big if: computers and their interfaces must become so good that, like electricity, they rarely require concentrated attention. The trouble with computers in their current form is that they are still all too conspicuous.

I'm not sure I agree with this notion that computers should "blend into the background" so that we don't notice them.  It not only sounds creepy (ok, maybe I've see The Matrix too many times), but more importantly, I don't think this will help users accomplish their goals.  It goes against almost all of Nielsen's Usability Heuristics, especially the following three:

• Visibility of system status.  The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
• Recognition rather than recall.  Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
• User control and freedom. Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.

If you can't see the computer, how will you know when you made a mistake, and how will you recover from it?  We simply can't rely on computers to figure out by itself what our needs are and how the system should meet those needs.  I believe that these technological advances into 3-D spaces, ubiquitous computing and novel input devices are going to exacerbate the enormous amount of usability issues that currently exists in software and web applications.  Again, if we can't even get it right in 2 dimensions, adding another one that looks "cool" isn't going to help.  We are, indeed, "compelled by complexity."  But maybe I'm wrong.  I hope so...

Amazon.com's redesigned home page

Amazon.com just redesigned their home page (click thumbnail on the left for a bigger picture).  Nothing major, but still a nice improvement.  At first glance there seems to be more visual consistency, and they're also now able to get more merchandising inserted above the fold.

The interesting part for me, however, is how they explain this change to users.  The top right corner has a link that says "We've been remodeling. Come take a look."  That immediately struck me because it's such a non-traditional, Web 2.0 way of writing copy. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The page you see when you click the "come take a look" link is shown below (again, click the thumbnail for a bigger version).  I really like the content on this page, and how Amazon speaks to their customers here.  My favorite part is how they framed what must have been countless hours of usability testing:

How did you decide on this design?

We consulted the foremost experts in the field: our customers. We traveled around the world, inviting customers like you to come and try out the new features and design. We listened to their feedback and made changes based on their opinions. Then we asked more customers for their advice, and we made more changes from their feedback. The design you see today reflects the input of many real-life customers of our U.S. and international websites

And about the slight color change of their main navigation bar:

Hmm. Something else looks different too. What is it?

Good eye! The color of the top navigation bar has changed--it's now a different (and slightly more fetching) shade of blue.

And then there are some quirky ways they address people who might not be happy with the change, like "But I liked Amazon the way it was! I really dug [insert your favorite feature here]."

I think this is a really great way of introducing design changes.  Talk to users like real people.  Be witty, open and honest.  Acknowledge that everyone might not like the changes, but explain in simple language your reasons for doing it.  Good job, Amazon...

Did the iPod's design evolution influence Apple's stock price?

The Wall Street Journal just published an interesting graph overlaying different iPod releases with Apple's stock price: 

Core77 Design Blog points to this as proof that good design can influence stock price.  This is what they say:

The clarity of their cohesive design language and its evolution over time is also instantly appreciated at a glance. If ever business needed confirmation that design can have a significant effect on your ROI, then this piece of infoporn is it.

At first glance I'd love to agree right off the bat, because I am a strong believer in the ROI of good design.  However, the researcher in me has to take a step back and ask if we can really say this based off this one chart.  As every researcher will tell you, correlation does not imply causality.  Just because 2 things happen at the same time, it does not mean that one event causes the other. 

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but there are hundreds of factors that influence the stock price, and we simply can't prove causality just by looking at this graph.  For example, how do we use design to explain the sudden drop in stock price between the iPod video launch and the redesign iPod shuffle launch?

Having said that, I do think that this poses an interesting question about what effect good user experience has on business metrics and revenue.  I guess if we can find a way to prove that beyond the shadow of a doubt, we won't have to spend half our time convincing people that good user experience is important...

A great user experience on Wine.com

A craving for a South African Pinotage led me to Wine.com last week, and I was extremely impressed with the site and the overall experience. Here's why I liked it so much. I think these principles should be top of mind during product design and development:

1. An online search experience designed around the natural offline experience. Even though there is a search box to look for a specific wine, it is not very prominent. Instead the "Shop For Wine" page is designed to help you find the wine you need based on price, location, varietal, etc. I was able to find South African Pinotages <$20 in less than a minute. You are able to add and remove filters in any order you'd like. I like this experience because they thought about the type of users that are going to come to the site, and what their needs are going to be. Buying wine is a browse & taste experience offline -- and they recreated that experience online through a really good browse experience.
   
2. Progressive product information disclosure. Once I got to $20 and Below > South Africa > Red Wine > Pinotage, a description appeared underneath the breadcrumb: Pinotage, a crossing made by the South Africans, is a hardy, rustic grape, with gamey and smoky mixing with wild berry flavors. Underneath this one-sentence overview was a "read more" link which exposes a dynamic layer pop-up on the page itself so that you can read more about the varietal without having to leave the page (more on that later). The search results gives you the information you need, and clicking into a specific wine leads to a world of additional information. But they don't dump it on you all at once -- progressive content disclosure is a difficult concept to get right, but they do it perfectly here.
   
3. Dynamic page elements allows maximum interaction without having to leave the page. I mentioned the "read more" link about the varietal in my second point, but I also noticed a great interaction element that I haven't seen on any other sites before. Clicking on "Add to cart" doesn't take you to your shopping cart -- it has a dynamic element that provides feedback about your action, but allows you to continue to shop without ever leaving the page. Below is a short video of it -- notice how the number of items in your cart updates automatically as well.
   
   
   
   
4. The experience doesn't end once you place an order. Let me just say that this is a company that understands wine-drinkers, and aims to provide a total experience with their products.
   • Once you place your order, you have the option to download and print "Cellar Notes", detailed descriptions of the wine you just bought, with an area to write down your own notes.
   • The wine arrives with a welcome letter that also gives you 1c shipping on your next order.
   • The box includes labels for your wines that you can hang on the bottles to make them easy to identify

This is only the second time it's ever happened to me that I become a loyal customer after my first interaction with a company (the other was Vonage, if anyone is wondering...). This experience was designed to be consistent online and offline. It was designed to never let technology get in the way of your goal -- to buy the perfect bottle of wine. And let me end with this picture of the brilliant Simonsig 2003 Pinotage that was the perfect ending to this story...

Can design save the world?

Last month I wrote briefly about a story I heard on the radio regarding an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt museum called Design For The Other 90%.  It is a collection of design ideas to improve the lives of people in developing countries, and I really admired the effort.  Until an article by David Stairs called Why Design Won't Save The World made me rethink the whole thing again...

David argues that even thought the idea behind this exhibition might be noble, it is poorly executed and ultimately misconstrued:

Essentially, Design For the Other 90% is shot through with well-intentioned nostrums, familiar statistics, and a messianic calling to open peoples’ eyes to the disparities of the world.

He continues to tell a story from his life to accentuate this point:

Not long ago I visited Gulu, the epicenter of northern Uganda’s twenty-year insurgency, with my friend David Latim. David was born in Gulu, but fled to Kampala after escaping from the Lord’s Resistance Army in 1995. One day, I recounted a particularly gruesome scene in the movie, Hotel Rwanda. He responded by describing a similar massacre he had personally witnessed as a young man in Gulu. Before he was half-finished with his story, I blushed with shame at the realization that I was comparing my movie-going experience to his life experience. My well-intended faux pas is emblematic of the challenge facing outsiders, who cannot begin to imagine the vicissitudes of life in such distant places.

His point is that designers cannot begin to understand the complexities of the cultures in these developing countries, and therefore cannot design effectively for them.  He goes into a lot more detail, but I wanted to skip to his final paragraph, which sums up his views and on which I would to comment:

Is there a realistic response designers from developed countries can offer? A starting point might be to recognize that in many cases, we don’t need to remake other people or their societies in our image and likeness. The idea of design intervention — sustainable or otherwise — may feel very intrusive to people who are still reeling from 150 years of colonial intervention. (You don’t just waltz into a patriarchal society and aggressively advocate equal opportunity for women, or deliver pumps and boreholes to peasant farmers without understanding the sociology of migratory herdsmen). Living among other people and learning to appreciate their values, perspectives and social mores is an excellent tool of design research.  Education is also a wonderful access point, as is a required second language. But how many design curricula are supporting, let alone implementing such global initiatives?

Now, as someone who grew up in one of these "developing countries", and who intends to return in a few years, I tried to look at this issue from the perspective of a "consumer" of these design ideas.  Then I put my user experience & design hat back on to make sense of it all, and I have the following response to David's views.  Even though I appreciate his viewpoint and he is clearly passionate about his own altruistic efforts, I do think he is being too critical of the Design For The Other 90% effort, for the following reasons:

• Designers rarely get it right the first time.  Unless you're Apple, you're very rarely going to design a product that works perfectly as soon as you put it out -- no matter how much upfront design research and anthropological work you do.  Design research is mostly qualitative in nature and until a product is "stress-tested" you won't know all the flaws and areas for improvement.  And let's be honest, misfires happen!  So if some of these designs don't immediately seem to hit the mark, that's ok.  Bad ideas are ok as long as they lead you to better ideas...
• Leading by example is not a bad thing.  When designers from developed countries show an interest in the developing world and apply their skills to better the lives of the world's poor, I think it's a good thing even if mistakes are made along the way.  Yes -- these countries should develop their own curriculums for design and raise up designers who can tackle the unique problems they face, but you need someone to spark the flame, right?  Designers interacting with users in these countries can do just that, and even if it might feel paternalistic to some, this "teaching people to fish" approach is what is needed.  You need experts to train upcoming experts...
• Let's take what we can get.  I think any good-intentioned attention the developing world gets is positive in its own unique way.  Is it weird to see Brad and Angelina talking about impoverished nations?  Yes -- but they are raising awareness and getting people interested in the plights of these nations.  Can someone who lives in these countries be inspired and touched by flawed yet good-intentioned efforts by designers who take the time to apply their skills to these unique problems, and build long-lasting relationships along the way?  I think they can...

Which brings me back to the main question I started with: can design save the world?  Probably not, but I think it can do its part, as this exhibition clearly shows.  And besides, who are we to stand in the way of those who are trying...

Usability testing on Halo 3

Wired Magazine just published an article about usability testing on Halo 3, the much-anticipated next installment in the Halo video game franchise, and the first Halo game for Xbox 360.  Video game usability has always fascinated me (and I try to get hands-on experience in this area as much as I can...), and this is the first time I've seen a mainstream magazine cover it in such detail.

Halo is a genre-changing first person shooter that brought gaming to a new level with its intricate story-line, cinematic feel and epic soundtrack.  And the creators got there through endless hours of testing...  Here are some excerpts from the article showing how they left no stone unturned:

The room we're monitoring is wired with video cameras that Pagulayan can swivel around to record the player's expressions or see which buttons they're pressing on the controller. Every moment of onscreen action is being digitally recorded.

Midway through the first level, his test subject stumbles into an area cluttered with boxes, where aliens — chattering little Grunts and howling, towering Brutes — quickly surround her. She's butchered in about 15 seconds. She keeps plowing back into the same battle but gets killed over and over again.

"Here's the problem," Pagulayan mutters, motioning to a computer monitor that shows us the game from the player's perspective. He points to a bunch of grenades lying on the ground. She ought to be picking those up and using them, he says, but the grenades aren't visible enough. "There's a million of them, but she just missed them. She charged right in." He shakes his head. "That's not acceptable."

After each session Pagulayan analyzes the data for patterns that he can report to Bungie. For example, he produces snapshots of where players are located in the game at various points in time — five minutes in, one hour in, eight hours in — to show how they are advancing. If they're going too fast, the game might be too easy; too slow, and it might be too hard. He can also generate a map showing where people are dying, to identify any topographical features that might be making a battle onerous. And he can produce charts that detail how players died, which might indicate that a particular alien or gun is proving unexpectedly lethal or impotent.

Pagulayan and his team have now analyzed more than 3,000 hours of Halo 3 played by some 600 everyday gamers, tracking everything from favored weapons to how and where — down to the square foot — players most frequently get killed.

The article goes into many more interesting examples of how they solved user issues with clever design.  Be sure to check it out.  And if you haven't seen the Halo 3 trailer yet, here it is for your viewing pleasure...

Making the case for ethnographic research to inform design

As a big fan of ethnographic research, two recent articles caught my attention.  Though pretty basic and meant for audiences who are not familiar with this type of research, the articles do make a good case for using this methodology in a business context as part of the design process.  I wanted to quote a few paragraphs that showcase insights that can be gained from ethnographic research that you can not get as effectively from other methodologies.  Bold emphasis added by me.

From a United Airlines publication entitled Executive Secrets - Greenhouse Effect:

Though ethnography is indeed a social science, a number of companies use it to gain a greater understanding of their customers. Their objective is to garner information to help create and develop products and services that better meet customers’ needs — especially those that customers haven’t yet articulated.

Jan Chipchase is an ethnographic specialist with the communications firm Nokia. Last summer, he and a team of designers and other ethnographers spent several weeks in Uganda. They traveled to multiple villages and lived with and observed the residents going about their activities. “We’re charged with bringing the experiences of the local culture into the company,” Chipchase says.

While in Uganda, Chipchase’s team noticed local entrepreneurs who had purchased their own cell phones and then sold minutes to other residents. Because customers paid in advance for their calls, they kept close track of their allotted minutes. Drawing from these observations, Nokia designed phones for use globally so that callers could easily see on the screen the number of minutes used per call.

To determine which observations are significant, the researchers focus not on the sensational but on the patterns that appear. Their goal is to find the actions that are common across many participants and discern their meaning. The insight that results can be compelling. “When it’s done right,” says Chipchase, “ethnography can inform and inspire the design process.”

From a Business Week article entitled Nokia's Global Design Sense:

Our process starts with a team of anthropologists and psychologists working in our design group. They spend time with specific types of people around the world to understand how they behave and communicate. This helps us to understand better and to spot early signals of new patterns of behavior that could be harnessed into mobile communication. Our designers often go out into the field to understand the world they are designing for. All of these observations are brought into the design process to inspire and inform our ideas.

One thing both articles don't mention is the fact that for ethnographic research to be truly effective, it should never be done on its own.  Exactly where in the research process ethnography fits in depends on the specific situation:

• Ethnographic research is usually done at the beginning of the design process, as is the case in most of the examples in the articles I just referenced.  This research is used to uncover user needs and help designers come up with high-level concepts.  This should be followed up by quantitative work (desirability surveys, needs & attitude surveys) as well us additional usability testing to further flesh out the concepts.
• Ethnography can also be extremely useful as a follow-up methodology to quantitative research like segmentation studies.  Once a market segmentation has taken place, ethnography can help companies understand each segment better by "living a day in their shoes" and understanding how customers use their products/web site within the context of the rest of their lives.

Ethnography is not an easy methodology to get right -- observing people is easy; knowing what to look for and how to uncover unmet needs and desires is not.  But it can yield extremely valuable insights that all levels of the business can utilize.

7 User Experience Lessons from the iPhone

Below is a really good presentation by Stephen P Anderson about what UX teams do. I think this is a great summary of the misconceptions that sometimes exist about the industry, and our true purpose

It also talks about the iPhone and the fact that it doesn't have an enormous amount of new features, instead it's the great user experience that makes it such a cool device. The 7 lessons Stephen points out (with my interpretation in brackets) are:

1. Place better experiences ahead of more features (fix the things that are broken)
2. Start with actual experiences (always do your research on how users act and interact)
3. Solve the real problems (don't create "fixes" for problems -- spend some time to eliminate the root cause of the problem)
4. Play to think (false starts are ok as long as it leads you to a better idea)
5. Treat interfaces like conversations (don't show users everything at once -- show them only what they need to complete their task)
6. Lead with a vision (don't be discouraged by existing process such as engineering limitations -- if people catch the vision they will make it happen)
7. Obsess on the details (sweating over seemingly insignificant interface and cosmetic elements can make all the difference in the world)

Stephen's one-sentence explanation of what UX teams do? We make things work for people. I like that a lot...

BTW, the quotes from the slideshow are all from a Time magazine article about the iPhone.

Bad Microwave UI

It is amazing to me that we're approaching 2008 and there are still microwave user interfaces out there that are close to impossible to figure out.  I tried to do a fairly simple but vital task on this microwave at a friend's house last night -- heating up my coffee -- but I just couldn't figure it out.  Maybe I'm stupid, who knows, but this was just too much for me.

Here are some issues I see with it:

• The "Start" button doesn't actually start the microwave.  And once you get it going (the only way I could figure out how to start blasting is by pressing the "Express" button), the "Off" button doesn't turn it off
• The labels are non-universal and therefore doesn't map to existing mental models of what microwaves should do.  What does "Combination" mean?  "Sensor"?
• The big round knob in the middle is for turning, and as far as I could tell, if you turn it, it does something to the length of time the microwave is on.  But there is no label on this knob and no way of knowing what it does.
• All the buttons are the same size, while different shapes and sizes can help users understand what the buttons are for (if you've seen the TiVo remote you'll know what I mean...).
• And a whole lot more but I'm already a dork for posting about this so I'll stop now

I actually do want to make a point here though...  Has anyone seen the user manual for the iPod or the iPhone?  It's only a few pages long.  That's how much confidence Apple has in the intuitiveness of the UI.  And they have every right to be -- it only takes a couple of minutes to figure it out, you don't even have to open the manual!

This microwave probably has an enormous user manual.  And for good reason -- it's a lazy design...  So anyway, it's a bad photo, but hopefully you'd be able to see what I mean:

Experience Is the Product

I really enjoyed this article in Business Week:

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2007/id20070622_697183.htm

I especially appreciate the section that talks about how the Kodak camera became one of the first consumer technology products. Here at eBay we often discuss the fact that the auction format can be inherently difficult for users to understand -- especially first time users -- which makes the design so much harder to get right. Kodak had the same problem, and marketed the camera with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest.” Here is a discussion about what happened next:

Take another look at that phrase—"You press the button, we do the rest." Eastman marketed the camera based on this promise of experience. But in order to achieve that result, Eastman couldn't just design a simpler product. That would only address the first half of the phrase.

On its own, a simple camera is meaningless, because the entire photographic process (loading a camera, exposing the light-sensitive material, removing that material, processing the material, printing images from that material) could not get any simpler. Eastman's genius was in designing his system so customers could do what mattered most to them—capturing the image ("You press the button"). Eastman located other functions elsewhere in the system ("We do the rest"), allowing the Kodak camera to be remarkably straightforward to use.

In order to meet his goals for delivering the desired experience, Eastman developed relationships with his customers that ensured they remained satisfied. He couldn't think of Kodak as a product, but as a service. This necessitated a factory unlike any seen before, one that could handle complex processing and printing capabilities. Investing in such an operation was an immense risk, but necessary if Eastman were to deliver on his promise to "Do the rest."

I think this points out an important design principle that is also true for web design -- enable the user to do what matters most to them, and hide everything they don't need to do in the back-end. Now, figuring out what should be shown and what shouldn't is a whole other story of course, and not easy. But it is a worthy goal. A couple of technology examples that get it right come to mind:

1. Putting a CD in your CD-ROM drive automatically pulls in meta-data about the album -- artist, album title, song titles, etc.
2. Intuit's TurboTax connects with your employer's payroll supplier to pull in your salary and other tax information -- reducing the possibility of user input error.
3. Amazon allows 1-click ordering -- automatically uses your default Credit Card and Address information to fulfill your order

Something to think about as you use the web every day -- what actions that sites ask you to do could be taken care of at the back-end without user input?

Facebook and MySpace: Comparing Visual Designs

Based on the controversy it stirred up, many of you have by now probably read "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace", Danah Boyd's article about the class differences between Facebook and MySpace (she also posted a response to critiques here). I think it is a courageous article, but I'm not going to write about her views here. I want to comment on one particular section that sparked some thinking for me, and it's around the differences between the visual designs of Facebook and MySpace. Danah says the following in her essay:

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and "so middle school." They prefer the "clean" look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is "so lame." What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as "glitzy" or "bling" or "fly" (or what my generation would call "phat") by subaltern teens. Terms like "bling" come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I'm sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the "eye of the beholder" - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That "clean" or "modern" look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I'm drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

It's that last sentence that got me thinking -- the notion that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are reproduced in online identities and the way we use the Internet. I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think that it paints the full picture. Could it just be that MySpace pages are ugly because users have such control over their pages that they can make it look however they want, and to be frank most people are pretty bad designers? If you look at the color schemes, layout and readability of most MySpace pages, it's pretty horrible, but I suspect it's just because users don't know any better. And the inconsistency everywhere you look is what makes it look so "messy". People's mental models are set up to look for patterns, and when they don't find it (like on MySpace) it leaves them with a pretty uneasy feeling, even if they're not sure what exactly it is that they're feeling...

Facebook, on the other hand, gives users almost no control over look and feel. You have immense control over the content on your page but you're pretty much stuck with what it looks like. There are even certain content containers that you can't move around on the page, which, in my opinion, is a good thing. It means that pages have a consistent visual design and users know what to expect and where to find information, which dramatically increases the ease of use.

When it comes to personalization, you can give users control over design and/or content. MySpace allows both, Facebook allows mostly content personalization. I think Facebook chose the better route...

Designing for the other 90%

I recently heard a great story on NPR about product designs that specifically fulfill user needs in developing countries:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11032381

Listen to the audio as well – it’s really great. Some excerpts from the story:

"Design for the Other 90%" features inventions created by social entrepreneurs that solve problems for those who lack adequate food, education, water and shelter.

The examples on display aren't conventionally pretty. Many cost just a couple of dollars to produce. Yet they could be life-changing for millions of poor people, says curator Cynthia Smith. For example, a simple ceramic pot nestled within a larger pot is a low-cost refrigeration system for fresh produce. Water poured into the sand around the smaller pot evaporates, taking the hot air with it.

And the LifeStraw, from a Danish firm, addresses a problem plaguing the world's poor. It's a personal mobile water-purification tool that turns any surface water into safe drinking water. The LifeStraw has been effective against waterborne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery and diarrhea. It is currently used in Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan and Uganda.

Other inventions include prosthetic limbs that cost only $30, and charcoal made from sugarcane stalks that substitutes for wood and helps prevent deforestation.