US universities reject ‘inaccessible’ Kindle e-Book

The E-Access Bulletin reports…

Two American universities have rejected the market-leading Kindle DX electronic book reader as a textbook replacement due to its inaccessibility for blind students. Both Syracuse University in New York State and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have chosen not to use the Kindle - manufactured by Amazon.com - as a teaching-aid, after their own trials found it was not fully accessible.

Interesting lessons for anyone else considering an e-reader device, and who wants to make it useful for as wide an audience as possible.
(forwarded by Pat)

Clients could make better use of research

Adweek recently published an article reporting…

Consumer research is ingrained in the cultures of many large corporations but relatively few are maximizing its use, according to a new study from The Boston Consulting Group [...] In fact, based on a four-stage scale of research development that BCG used to evaluate the 40 global companies it surveyed, nearly 90 percent were in the first or second stage, where research is generally tactical and applied in limited contexts.

This has generated quite a few comments, and criticism, although nobody seems to disagree with the basic sentiment of the report (that research could be more prevalent and better used). What do you think?
(forwarded by Pat)

Map of the design landscape

Over on DesignAday, Jack Moffett shares a timeline visualisation of the major—mostly US—design disciplines created by one of his graduate students.
(forwarded by Angus)

IA tools: storyboards

Matt Hodgson shares his thoughts on storyboards…

Storyboards are a great way to describe a user’s journey, their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, capabilities, behaviours and expectations, throughout a single scenario. They’re light-weight, easy to do, and as a visual tool can be used in workshops or just by a couple of members of the team. They also work perfectly on agile projects because they’re visual and, therefore, an instant placeholder for a conversation.

(forwarded by Angus)

So you wanna be a user experience designer

Whitney Hess shares her five guiding principles for working in UX…

I have collected a set of guiding principles for user experience designers, to encourage behaviors that I believe are necessary to being a successful practitioner, as well as a set of guiding principles for experience design — which I think anyone who touches a product used by humans should strive to follow.

(forwarded by Angus)

Getting to the customer – why everything you think about User Centred Design is wrong

On Black&White, Thomas Petersen discusses solving the right problem at the right time…

What you are solving in the wireframe phase is problems inherent in the wireframe phase, not problems with the product. What you are solving when testing the prototype is problems inherent in the prototype not in the final product. There is only one true test and that is the final product. Not until then will you start to receive valuable feedback in combination with quantitative feedback. You will get it where it matters.

This is something we’ve talked about in our team on a number of occasions. It’s an important aspect of the UX design process to get sorted out.
(forwarded by Angus)

Google tests streamlining search options feature

Over on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan tells us how Google is tackling its “UI jazz problem”…

“I don’t like jazz, because you never know what’s going to happen next,” Mayer said, continuing on to apply the musical style to Google’s search results. “I’ve been calling this problem ‘user interface jazz.’ This result looks this way, and that result looks that way [something much different], and it really does slow you down.”

(forwarded by Angus)

Some design principles from the Global Agenda Council on Design

Tim Brown, of renowned design and innovation consulting firm, IDEO, shares with us seven principles as discussed at the recent World Economic Forum event in Dubai…

Design is an agent of change that enables us to understand complex changes and problems, and to turn them into something useful. Tackling today’s global challenges will require radical thinking, creative solutions and collaborative action. Here is a set of principles identified by the Global Agenda Council on Design that could help your Council to develop ideas and strategies to address the complex problems facing us all.

(forwarded by Angus)

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.

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.

At the risk of reducing productivity I’d suggest a quick browse through the failblog to see some interesting usability issues (as well as some genuinely funny pictures), there is a work-safe filter available at the top of the screen.

In his Alertbox article entitled When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods, Christian Rohrer gives a good overview of various research methods and when to apply them.

The field of user experience, is blessed (or cursed) with a very wide range of research methods, ranging from tried-and-true methods such as lab-based usability studies to those that have been more recently developed, such as desirability studies (to measure aesthetic appeal).

You can’t use the full set of methods on every project, but most design teams benefit from combining insights from multiple research methods. The key question is what to do when. To better understand when to use which method, it is helpful to realize that they differ along 3 dimensions:

• Attitudinal vs. Behavioral
• Qualitative vs. Quantitative
• Context of Website or Product Use

The plotting of research methods according to these three dimensions is quite handy, as is his advice regarding combining multiple methods for any particular project.

Of particular interest is the “Context of Product Use” dimension. This dimension refers to whether or not you’re asking the participant to use the product in a certain way, as opposed to just observing how they might naturally use it. This can have a big impact on the method you would employ, and highly scripted approaches risk Asking Participants to “Pretend” in User Studies (which Jared Spool recently wrote about).

While this article should be quite useful in helping people to narrow down the most appropriate design research methods to use, it might not be enough. Inexperienced readers may still not be able to decide which method to use, even assessing all possible methods using these dimensions. What’s missing is the X factor regarding which factors are best for certain situations, but this probably comes down purely to experience and is a professional preference that develops over time (and would thus be difficult to capture in an article). All in all, a very useful article.

[Chris, if it's not on the blog, it's just not on :)]

Adaptive Path’s Indi Young shares some ideas on sharing your audience’s perspective in her article Look at it Another Way.

I particularly like this example:

The people who designed the bike talk about what the bike can do, but the rider wants to find out what she can do. In the former vocabulary: “We give you 20 gears.” In the latter vocabulary: “I’ve decided to bike to work twice a week, but I fear the pain of getting up that steep hill on the way there.” If the bike company were smart, they’d be talking about making it easier to get up hills while commuting to work, or suggesting alternate routes or techniques so that you’ll arrive at the office without needing a shower and a nap.

This is great stuff and I’m sure some of the analogies used by Indi could help promote a User Centred Design mentality among web, product and customer service teams.