I read with interest the latest newsletter from London based UX agency Foviance, including the article The more the merrier? by Mariana da Silva (the latest newsletter is unfortunately not on their website yet Update: the full article is now on their website).

Overall this was a fairly well written discussion of sample sizes in user research, in layman’s terms. But one statement confused me somewhat, I’ve highlighted it below:

With surveys, sample size estimation is also somewhat less straightforward than with standard usability evaluations. Here, the information being collected is attitudinal data, which by its sheer nature can be slightly fuzzy. It all comes down to the size of the effect you intend to detect. Imagine you wanted to know whether people in London are taller than people in New York. If people in London and people in New York are actually pretty much the same height, you will need to measure a high number of citizens of both cities. If, on the other hand, people in London were particularly tall and people in New York were shorter than average, this will be obvious after measuring just a handful of people.

Now, I’m no statistics whizz, but that last bit doesn’t make sense to me. Wouldn’t this only be true if you knew ahead of time that Lononders were “particularly tall”? Otherwise the handful you measured might just be anomalous.

Like I said, I may be missing the point and this is in fact an excellent illustration of a fundamental error in my thinking with regard to sample sizes. Feel free to share your thoughts.

As if I needed another reason why it would be cool to live in Canada, there is the DesignThinkers conference in Toronto.

Join creative professionals from all walks of design thinkers to share experiences, run with new ideas and celebrate the power of design.

Looks like a great line-up, in particular Rick Poynor’s talk entitled So what did designers think about before they invented design thinking? which seems to be a hot topic at the moment as ‘design thinking’ pops up more and more in mainstream conversations.

If anyone reading this attends the conference, I’d appreciate a wrap-up once it’s over :)

Can a well considered defiance of a convention help induce an emotional attachment to an object?

I own a car that is a bit different to other cars that I have driven:

• The ignition is on the left side of the steering wheel
• It has a foot pedal for a park brake… not a hand brake.
• There’s no lever to open the petrol cap. Instead, if the car is unlocked then the petrol cap is unlocked and I’m supposed to just push it to open it (when I bought the car I actually spent a good half hour looking for a lever)

For each of these I consider the opposite – or alternative – to be the convention and the setup in my car to be against my initial expectations.

Here’s the thing. After owning the car for a while I have discovered that now when I drive a different car – with the usual conventions – that I feel uncomfortable and out of place. My habits have formed strongly enough that now I always have the keys in the left hand, never use the petrol cap lever and always try to engage the park brake with my left leg… repeatedly, and without success in a car configured in a more standard manner.

In other words, my experience of the conventional setup has been ruined by long term exposure to something different. I now have a new convention that I strongly associate with a single object.

I think that it’s worth exploring the idea that a well considered deviation from an interface standard can actually increase the attachment to an object.

Here’s another example – Gmail.

I actually think Gmail is pretty “sucky” in many ways but for me it was the first webmail that wasn’t unbearable – which was why I started using it. The no folders approach to gmail is frequently annoying (against convention) but it’s actually impacted the way I use Outlook in that I now have no folders and try to use the search function in outlook to find everything (usually unsuccessfully). I now feel uneasy in non-Gmail because the search isn’t any good.

Now, obviously, this type of approach could only work for interfaces that a user will be engaged with frequently. Without frequent (and probably prolonged) association with an object the new habits will not be formed. In addition, the type of object and the circumstances under which it is used are probably a factor. As Stephen pointed out to me earlier this could be looked at in terms of people’s tendency to “anthropomorphise object and tools”… I suspect that some types of object are more likely to have their quirks projected into personalities than others. Then again, I’ve heard of people developing attachment to a Roomba and to me that’s “just a vacuum.”

As to whether the new way of doing things needs to be better for attachment to occur. I suspect it probably doesn’t (Stockholm Syndrome might agree with me on that) but, of course, a positive attachment is better than a negative one.

Does anyone else have a different take on this?

Usability News reports on a study into the usability of mobile websites, originally reported by CNET.

As part of the study, more than 75 participants were asked to find an entertainment news story, read it, and search for a story on another specific top and then send that story to a friend. Keynote found that even big Internet brands, which have invested a lot in mobile development did not score exceedingly well in terms of satisfaction. In fact rates were low for both Yahoo, which only scored 51 percent satisfaction, and Fox News, which scored 64 percent satisfaction for their mobile Web sites.

That said, Fox News users were more likely to find the mobile experience to be better than a computer experience.

It would be interesting to run a similar study on some local m-sites to see if they perform any better. In particular to see how the local News sites compare to our Fox cousins.

In lieu of that, anyone have any feedback on the usability of the mobile versions of Australian news websites?

This weekend saw the relaunch of the new news.com.au.  This is a project we’ve been working on for quite some time.

I’m really proud of the way it’s turned out, and it introduces a whole raft of new features not seen on any Australian media site before.  These include:

• Personalisation through drag’n'drop
• Cookie based Personalisation, so no need to register
• Ability to dynamically open sub-sections within the page (for instance you can now have a ‘Movies & Television’ content area show on the homepage itself)
• A visual take on the news (click on the News Visualiser tab)
• Improved page layout
• Rationalised and simplified Information Architecture
• Dynamic infotips and help
• Improved, higher contrast font colours and typography
• National & World sections which showcase the best news from around the world (we aggregate from other news sites)
• Faster page load times
• Improved navigation
• Story pages which use highly contextualised linking to give you access to related stories
• Story pages which include new site-wide navigational footers
• Cleaner visual design
• Improved Search form placement and optimised search results page

I’d like to hear any feedback you have on what we’ve done (positive and negative both welcome!)

Please, either reply here or on the news.com.au editorial blog.

Ars technica have an interesting write up on  product preferences being influenced by adding statistics to advertising, even when the stats don’t mean a thing.

basically:

“A study released by the Journal of Consumer Research suggests it doesn’t really matter: everyone just wants bigger numbers. As the researchers found, it doesn’t even matter if those numbers don’t line up with personal experience, or even if they’re completely made up.”

I just had this story about the New York Times and their debt problems pop up in my feeds.

Not sure how it came to this so fast, but the New York Times (NYT) is approaching the point where it will have to manage its business primarily to conserve cash and avoid defaulting on its debt.

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on this, seeing as they are often held up as a paragon of online news sources?

Here’s a conference that I’d go to in a heartbeat if I had the opportunity. In particular I want to go to one of  the Friday sessions entitled, “Consumption and value“. It says:

“Attention” can be thought of as a core product produced by media companies – under advertiser-supported models, media properties attract audiences whose attention is sold to advertisers seeking to reach groups of people. While this is not always the case, the increasing significance of product placement suggests even goods sold directly to audiences are subsidized by the sale of their attention.

This has been something that’s always intrigued me, and follows on a little from my last post. The importance of what we do as an Customer Experience team is to provide frameworks through which our content creators can capture more attention.

I’m wondering how long it will be before we start working more closely with advertisers to merge content with product placement, in more subtle ways than “skinning sites”.

This snippet from the E-Access Bulletin shows accessibility is gaining some traction off the web…

Nano Praise: Apple’s latest iPod Nano has been praised by the American Federation of the Blind for incorporating innovations that make the device accessible to blind users. The latest model of Apple’s popular portable music player features spoken menus to allow listeners to hear track names and details, a variable contrast screen and the ability to resize text.

(You can read the original article on AFB.org)

I read with interest James Robertson’s post 25 reasons why saving time on your intranet is a bad metric in which he examines the common practice of measuring time per task to assess the usability and effectiveness of an intranet, and the increasingly disturbing practice of calculating a return on investment based on potential time savings.

The problem is that these metrics are fatally flawed, in almost every respect. They are a bad basis for intranet teams to justify their existence or demonstrate their value, and are dangerous in ways that aren’t properly recognised. So as a service to intranet teams, I’d like see if I can demolish this once and for all.

Measuring the time it takes staff to perform tasks on their intranet has become almost ubiquitous, but I can say from personal experience that it’s usually a waste of time. From my point of view, the main problem is tasks that are completely unrealistic, but the full list of problems that James lists is excellent and painfully true (like watching an episode of “The Office” if you have ever spent any time working on intranets).

Task-based usability testing of an intranet (or a website) has it’s place, but it’s not the primary method we should be using. And certainly when presenting the results we need to be very careful, I would only include them as part of a holistic appraisal of the site and even then only refer to the trends that might require further investigation based on the time per task results. I wouldn’t tell stakeholders they’ve just saved millions by tweaking their intranet.

[By the way, the articles James quotes are from Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com not our Usit.com.au]