The IKEA hack by Daylight Design

(apologies for the Pink Floyd reference).

Anyhow, recently I’ve been reflecting on the benefits of wall space and utilising it for UX activities. I remember one of my early inspirations being reading about the BBC’s Glass Wall project. The BBC’s physical Glass wall in their offices…

gave us the title of this book was the centre of the project. Most of our discussions were visualised on the wall and its location at the entrance to the studio ensured everyone could see what was going on and contribute.

The things I like about walls and UX activities include:

• ability for passers by to gain exposure to UX and design thinking
• a large canvas, it’s like being about to really zoom out and include a lot of different things that can be considered together
• ability to have these thing in the background for standup or more extended meetings where they can inspire or focus discussion
• deeper thinking can be encouraged by prolonged subliminal exposure to elements on the wall

If you are looking for inspiration on how to create portable wall space solutions for UX Harry Brignull has put put together a great list of suggestions in his What do you use for portable wall space? article, that includes a nifty IKEA hack as pictured above.

Webnographers

There’s some great stuff to be found over on webnographers.org for anyone interested in virtual ethnography. Here’s their blurb…

Cyberanthropology is but a fetal field, far from defined. This website was developed in the interest of providing a central hub for those interested in ethnography of the internet. Created by and for webnographers, its success in contingent on your participation.

Ethnography is not constrained solely to anthropologists, and indeed the barriers that divide the various social sciences are at once arbitrary and collapsible. Any individual interested in the complex social, cultural, and psychological facets of humans relating with and through the internet is encouraged to join in this nascent community. Webnographers unite!

This is a very interesting area of research, and an area in which our team is expanding with each and every project.
(forwarded by Pat)

The 10 dos and don’ts of website development (that every CEO should know)

Over on the FatDUX blog, Eric Reiss shares his top 10 list for management:

[...] the web has become more important than ever as a means of communicating with customers/clients/membership. But I have yet to meet a CEO who likes website development. It makes business leaders uncomfortable. The web experts speak in a cryptic language – CMS, KM, XML, CSS. The site seems to take forever to build, costs more than expected, and invariably provides less value than the organization had hoped.

No one likes signing a big check without some idea as to what they’re getting. So if you’re a business leader, here are a few basic, non-technical tips that will significantly increase your chances for online success. And they let you do what you do best – lead.

There are some good points in there, and the central point of reminding business leaders to not get caught up in the detail, but rather to be leaders is excellent. These tips were obviously learned and refined over many, many client engagements!
(forwarded by Pat)

Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film

Over on Gizmodo, John Herrman discusses Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them…

Designing a fake dashboard for an imagined supercomputer or a hovering control panel for a worldwide surveillance system is a different process than creating a genuinely usable UI. Your goal is to imply things: that a machine is powerful; that a villain is formidable; that the software is intuitive, but that the breadth of its powers borders on unknowable. At no point does real-world usability factor in, and nor should it—this is pure fantasy, for an audience raised on Start Buttons, desktop icons and tree menus

He forgets to mention the “Unix system” from Jurassic Park, possibly the most ridiculous of all of these movie UIs :)
(forwarded by Angus)

Dimensions of design/Against ahistoricity

Adam Greenfield talks about looking beyond the obvious sources of insight and inspiration, including those who have come before us…

Let’s face it: brighter and more sensitive people than us have been thinking about issues like public versus private realms, or which elements of a system are hard to reconfigure and which more open to user specification, for many hundreds of years. Medieval Islamic urbanism, for example, had some notions about how to demarcate transitional spaces between public and fully private that might still usefully inform the design of digital applications and services. By contrast, the level of sophistication with which those of us engaged in such design generally handle these issues is risible (and here I’m pointing a finger at just about the entire UX “community” and the technology industry that supports it).

Even if you don’t like Adam’s writing style, this is a thought provoking piece. Especially interesting was the introductory quote from the book Responsive Environments: A Manual for Designers which outlines how design can actually make people do things – as suggested by Jon Kolko and argued against in the recent Sydney UX book club.
(forwarded by Angus)

Walt Disney’s Creative Organization Chart

Delphine Hirasuna writes about the typically unique way in which Disney went about things, in this case the humble org chart…

The Disney org chart, on the other hand, is based on process, from the story idea through direction to the final release of the film. All of the staff positions are in the service of supporting this work flow. Perhaps the question now is what should the org chart of the future look like, given the global workforce, telecommuting personnel, virtual employees, outsourced jobs and contract workers who sometimes outnumber salaried staff? In an idea-based, rather than a manufacturing-based, economy, how should a business organize itself?

(forwarded by Angus)

Content Strategist as Digital Curator

On A List Apart, Erin Scime examines the role of curator in digital media…

When a site launches, your audience arrives to learn more about what you know most about. It’s critical to create a content experience with purpose, that is consistent and contextual. This helps to assert your brand’s authority, establishes relationships with your audience, and secures a return visit based on your content’s value. The content strategist-as-curator is the one who makes this happen. How?

(forwarded by Angus)

Landline phone numbers in electronic forms

Jess Enders shares the results of her research on how to best format phone numbers…

The research findings: one long string is the clear winner. Like the mobile phone numbers, one long string of digits—including area code—was the most common method of data entry: out of 640 landline phone numbers provided by interested research participants, 39% were entered as one long string of 10 digits (i.e. no spaces and no chunking).

(forwarded by Angus)

4 Out of 5 Viewers Leave If a Stream Buffers Once

Janko Roettgers reveals some interesting video-related user behaviour…

More than 81 percent of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a clip rebuffering, according to a new study by Tubemogul. The Emeryville-based video distribution and analytics startup took a close look at 192 million video streams over the course of 14 days to figure out how much rebuffers matter. The result: 6.81 percent of all streams rebuffer at some point, and around 2.5 percent rebuffer twice.

(forwarded by Angus)

How UCD and Agile can live together

David Farkas sets out a framework in which UCD and Agile can work together:

Diagrams are pretty, Gantt charts set expectations, but reality is far from perfect. At the end of the day, a project manager must own the project and there must be some sense of reporting. Depending on the project manager’s background and personal goals there will tend to be a focus towards the needs of UCD or Agile… Finally, friction exists from misaligned expectations from UCD practitioners forcing their methods too late in the game or agile practitioners trying to wean out hard requirements before purpose is fully understood.

(forwarded by Sophie)

Huffington Post wants to add paid tweets to its articles. Will advertisers bite?

(or, an alternate headline offered by one commenter, “HuffPo Sells Remaining Fraction of Soul for Ongoing Revenue Stream”?)

In Advertising Age, Nat Ives reports…

The Huffington Post has started offering marketers the ability to inject their own paid comments among reader comments and place paid Tweets among the live Twitter feeds the site assembles around news subjects and events.

Marketers haven’t bought in yet, but they seem likely to be intrigued. The biggest question is whether marketers and the Huffington Post can execute the program without marring visitors’ experience reading and interacting with the site.

(forwarded by Sophie)

Should journos have their Twitter profiles taken from them if they change job?

And, on the subject of journalists tweeting, Mumbrella asks whether journalists should have their Twitter profiles taken from them if they change jobs:

There’s an argument both ways. You could view it in the same way as when a reporter changes newspaper, they’ll take their contacts book with them. I’ve now got business cards and contacts books stretching back 20 years. I’m not sure what use the private phone number for Farnborough ambulance station in the UK would be for me now, but I’ve still got it somewhere.

(forwarded by Sophie)

A few months ago I was invited to present at the UPA (Usability Professionals Association) Sydney’s 2nd anniversary party alongside the excellent Cameron Adams who talked about the design of Google Wave.

Having presented a few case studies ,over the course of the year, I decided to take a different approach to this talk and explore a more blue sky topic. In this case – the progression away from the Direct Manipulation paradigm towards Indirect Manager via Intelligent User Interfaces and the Semantic Web.

I’ve only now got around to posting it here, better late than never!

New book: Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction

Way over a year ago I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a project initiated by my friend and former colleague Dr Linda Leung from the Institute for Interactive Multimedia, University of Technology, Sydney. Linda is the a Senior Lecturer, course coordinator and one of the founders of the Masters of Interactive Multimedia offered by the Institute and I used to teach with her in the subject Digital Information and Interaction Design. The subject

encourages students to critically engage with interdisciplinary approaches to information and interaction design

and to apply their own interpretation of these theories

to real-world design project in which students work with a client, with advice and input from industry professionals.

Typically the real world project was developed for iTV and that in itself required students to translate the principles of web design and information architecture to the development of interactive television (iTV) interfaces.

I was one of those industry professionals involved with teaching the subject (during the time I was also working at Information Architect for the Institute). One of the challenges Linda identified when teaching aspiring experience designers is (in her own words)…

the awkward rise of a discourse and discipline finding its feet and which still needs to grow with the support from its older cousins. Indeed, the necessity of turning to other design disciplines is acknowledged by Shedroff (2001:2 in Leung, 2008): simultaneously having no history (since it is a discipline only recently defined), and the longest history (since it is the culmination of many ancient disciplines), Experience Design has become newly recognised and named.’

So that is where I came in. I was one of ten industry professionals working in digital media who came from backgrounds diverse as education, feminism, fashion design, architecture, cultural theory, film-making who had moved into experience design. Linda recognised that these backgrounds had significant impact on the approach we as experience designers had towards the work we now did and provide a framework for understanding our discipline in a multidisciplinary way and so she set out to write a co-written book with the nine of us.

My own background is in fine art and although I don’t often make the connection consciously, my early training in fine art (I now recognise) has helped me along the way in understanding users particularly in relation to how they interact with the visual and aesthetic properties of digital media. It’s also helped me understand and work with visual designers. My contribution to the book can be found in chapter ten entitled Art and Articulation: The Finer Points of engaging the User in Abstract Concepts and Lateral Thinking. To give you a taste…

Fine art challenges its audience to engage with abstract concepts that may not be easily articulated and require introspective reflection. The art gallery offers a rich metaphor for conceptualising digital experiences: just as the gallery is the space where the spectator engages with works of art, digital worlds represent the interface between users and content. Furthermore, the art world creates experiences that enable uses to tackle challenging content, and elevates content to the level of the sacred. This can be applied in digital design to contexts where ideas take primacy. However, conceptualising an online environment as a gallery and its content as “art’ can mean contravening web usability principles which assume task-orientated, utilitarian and time-constrained online interactions.

This chapter examines the ways in which art is presented, and the design of experiences of art. The instruments which ‘frame’ an artwork and scaffold the experience for the spectator are discussed in relation to how such techniques can be translated for digital contexts.

I’m excited to announce that tonight Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction (Edited by Linda Leung) is being launched by Dr Elaine Lally, Senior Research Fellow and Assistant Director Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney and  is available from Intellect Books and Amazon.

It’s been an amazingly insightful experience for me to work with Linda and gain some knowledge into what it takes to turn an idea into a book. I have utmost respect for her determination and academic resilience to the writing, editing and review process and thank her immensely for the opportunity it has given me. It’s exciting also that the book will be utilised as the set text for two subjects: Digital Information and Interaction design and Digital Sound and the Moving Image in the Graduate programs for Interactive Multimedia at UTS. I’m dying to read all the chapters as collection and ponder the mulit-disciplinary realm of our practice myself. If you are reading this an happen to go on to the read the book I’d love to know what you think, maybe post a comment here on our blog. In the meantime I’ll leave you with Linda’s summary from the back of the jacket.

Digital Experience Design chronicles the diverse histories and perspectives of people working in the dot.com world, with contributors from a wide range of different backgrounds offering autobiographical accounts of their careers in the digital experience design and interactive media industry. This is a book of ideas about digital experience design expressed through the voices of practitioners and seen through the lenses of the disciplines in which they originally trained. From the perspective of older disciplines such as education, fine art, and cinema, this volume investigates how dot.com practitioners balance the ‘science’ of usability with the ‘art’ of experience design and  the more abstract, emotional and atmospheric elements of users’ digital interactions. Digital Experience Design seeks to borrow from alternative fields that have richer traditions and longer histories in experience design to assist current online designers and practitioners. Covering  a range of forms of digital experience design, be it computer games, DVDs, touchscreen kiosks or mobile phones , this edited volume is a valuable resource for industry practitioners and students and teachers of interactive media.

Interesting post by Bruce Tognazzini about whether Apple’s software product design ethos is too simplistic.

Now (confession time) not being an Apple aficionado I can’t really pass comment, however his general points seem quite valid. One of the founding principles of Interaction Design is to create solutions that are eminently understandable by the novice, but grow as the user become more competent then expert.

So, we aim to make the initial state as simple and as closely aligned to the user’s mental model as possible. Simplicity does not mean lack of functionality (which I think could be the issue with Apple), it means a fast initial learning curve and consideration of the number of concepts a user needs to understand.

However, the product should have a built in path to higher proficiency, facilitating enhanced functionality, high speed interaction and minimal application feedback as the user requires it.

Tognazzini seems to be implying that Apple software products are well suited to ‘Leading the novice’ but fall short on ‘empowering the expert’ . Certainly, in the past, Apple have not really carried out much in the way of design research. Could this be at the heart of some of these issues?

Do any of you Apple users out there think Tog’s argument is justified?

There’s a short case study over on Marketing mag about news.com.au – increasing user engagement and website traffic through redesign. Here’s a snippet:

The factors that determined news.com.au’s re-design came as a result of extensive prelaunch user and industry research; requirements from a wide range of stakeholders; exhaustive testing and a study of new technological solutions.

Yet another accolade for the News redesign team, including USiT’s own Chris Khalil!

(See our own post on the redesign)

The Courier Mail reports that Police avoid arrests due to time-consuming QPRIME computer system, a rare case of usability making an appearance in mainstream media. Here’s an extract:

Frustrated Queensland police are turning a blind eye to crime to avoid time-consuming data entry on the force’s new $100 million computer system…the latest phased roll-out of QPRIME, or Queensland Police Records Information Management Exchange…”They are reluctant to make arrests and they’re showing a lot more discretion in the arrests they make because QPRIME is so convoluted to navigate,”…jobs could now take up to seven hours to process because of the amount of data entry involved.

What I find most annoying is that a Queensland Police Service spokesperson said “…the benefits of the QPRIME system into the future far outweigh short-term disaffection by some officers…” which misses the point. It’s not officers’ disaffection that is the problem, it’s the larger impact on their ability to perform their duties!

I hear this all the time; “it’s not a big deal, users will get used to it”. But it’s the cumulative effect of all these “minor issues” that will affect usability, efficiency and in the case of police officers, the safety of our community.

Meanwhile, a similar story in the Washington Post describes how…

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects…partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.

[Thanks to Dorian Taylor for the tip off regarding the Washington Post article via the IA Institute mailing list]

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/agile-methods.html

I found this article interesting as it spells out problems and solutions for combining UCD and agile project method – that I have had difficulty pinpointing during my project work. I wish my project team would read and understand this stuff.

This article made me realise that as an EA, I need to become skilled in, and get good at conducting fast and quick user tests. Testing could be part of my day-to-day activity, rather than needing it to be a separate task on the project timeline. Requesting project time for user testing will often be rejected, because people are worried it takes too much time.

Nielsen refers to a Tivo case study, where they ran weekly tests, but doesnt give too much detail on how. Nielsen recommends paper prototypes, but I dont think it takes much to whip up some wireframes – then at least they can be sent through to remote testers. The challenges are defining what to test and how to recruit particpants quickly and for free? Participants from our USiT team is a start….?

As for defining what to test, from my experience recently on 3 agile projects, the requirements were so undefined, and evolving, that I would have thought it would be difficult to nail down something to test. Then I read this advice:

“Keep a sense of humor and a good attitude. Have a flexible staff that’s willing to roll with the pace and unknown nature of the work. “You don’t know what you’re going to test next,” says Torres. “It was really taxing on researchers. At times, I didn’t know what we were testing until the night before, and I had to build a prototype and be ready to moderate the next day.”

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weekly-usability-tests.html

So perhaps its not them, its me!?

The Google analytics interface has recently had a change in the way it does tabular data. There’s an option that’s been there for a while to determine how many rows to show:

Show rows in Google analytics

What confuses me is that in the most recent update they’ve added header rows but haven’t changed the way they count rows. In the above example when I select “5″ for show rows, it displays three header rows and two of the associated rows below them.

Perhaps they just haven’t gotten around to updating it yet but surely when I ask for five rows I really mean five… not two-and-a-bit.

After more than six months of careful planning the redesign of The Australian Business website went live on the 18^th October.

The new business site design was conceived through a comprehensive understanding of user needs for financial information. Contextual enquiry during the research phase lead by Dennis Nordstrom identified a clear user need for the delivery of a wide breadth and depth of world financial information in an Australian context.

Creating the site structure during the collaborative design session

In content terms the site needed to integrate the full business editorial resources of the national newspaper and in a News Corporation first be underpinned by contextual content/market data from other global properties such as The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Dow Jones and MarketWatch.

Therefore the mission from a user experience perspective was to successfully convey the huge volume of financial information available in a fashion that did not overwhelm or confuse.

Collaborative design sketch by Dennis Nordstrom & Alun Machin

The final product design concept was based around a simple contextual three column based solution for the vast majority of site sections. Editorial content is primary displayed in the left column, comparative market data/tools are placed in the centre column and supporting analysis, opinion and multimedia in the right hand column.

The final result

The site also introduces a whole new raft of features including:

• A snapshot of the key markets, currencies and commodities around the world at the top of every site page
• New areas focusing on World Business News, Financial Markets, Industry Sectors, Mining & Energy, Media, Opinion, Wealth and Executive Lifestyle
• Expanded editorial coverage and contextual market data for industry sectors such as Property and Aviation
• Interactive company charting showing key events and trading data such as dividend payments, trading volume underpinned with contextual news reports
• Comprehensive background information on all ASX-listed Australian companies plus data on stocks, stock market indices, currencies and commodities
• Suggested company name functionality when searching for stock quote information
• Display of previously searched company stock quotes
• ‘Story behind the story’ in-depth coverage on major issues such as the current global financial crisis

For further information on the new website a comprehensive guide is available to view in PDF format.

If you have any feedback (both positive and negative) or questions concerning the new site please leave a comment.