paper & pencil

browse and search

new HFI article —  The answer you're searching for... is "Browse" — looks at various research on how users browse, when they turn to search and the success rates for both.

Dr. Eric Shaffer's take on the research findings:

In mainframe systems we often said "if the user went often to help, it indicated a bad design." This did not mean dropping help. But we concentrated first on fixing the menu structures and screen interaction. It seems that has not changed.

Today when users often go to search, it is an indication of navigational problems. Certainly there are a few sites where search is the obvious primary navigation (e.g., a book selling site where users know the title). But for most sites the first design objective is to get the navigation right. Make sure it fits the user's mental model. Make sure the wording gives clear scent. Make sure the top level structure shows lots of the choices right there (is "broad"). Luckily we have lots of methods to do this quickly and reliably. Then this research certainly says, in addition, DO provide search.

sIFR

need to check this out further — Introducing sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text

The following explains the sIFR process:

1. A page is requested and loaded.
2. Javascript detects if Flash 6 or greater is installed.
3. If no Flash is detected, the page is drawn as normal.
4. If Flash is detected, the HTML element of the page is immediately given the class “hasFlash”. This effectively hides all text areas to be replaced but keeps their bounds intact. The text is hidden because of a style in the stylesheet which only applies to elements that are children of the html.hasFlash element.
5. The javascript traverses through the DOM and finds all elements to be replaced. Once found, the script measures the offsetWidth and offsetHeight of the element and replaces it with a Flash movie of the same dimensions.
6. The Flash movie, knowing its textual content, creates a dynamic text field and renders the text at a very large size (96pt).
7. The Flash movie reduces the point size of the text until it all fits within the overall size of the movie.

accessibility primer

good article by Matt May in Digital Web Magazine — Accessibility From The Ground Up: A Primer for the Web designer

good point:

The hardest part of Web accessibility, in my opinion, is the stuff outside the angle brackets.

some good reminders such as using the summary attribute to explain the purpose of tabular data in tables and the use of abbr and acronym.

on accessibility testing tools:

If you or your team is going about designing a site blithely unaware that accessibility problems are being created, automated tools are not going to save you in the end. They’ll just confirm what you probably already know—stuff is broken.

Designers need to study the needs of accessibility and design it into their processes from the beginning. It is sufficient for most purposes to read a book or two on Web accessibility to understand the audience you’re building for, what its needs are, and how to satisfy those needs.

Nearly all of the automated tools in the market also return “manual checks.” My experience, and that of the developers of these tools, is that authors often gloss over these checks, or don’t understand what is really required. A basic grounding in the meaning and intent of these manual checks will help you to build more accessible pages—and save a lot of time.

10 types of innovation

Doblin, Inc. an "innovation strategy" firm in Chicago has a matrix of innovation types on their site. It's organized into 4 categories with examples for each type. Under the category of Delivery:

10. Customer experience
How your customers feel when they interact with your company and its offerings Harley Davidson has created a worldwide community of millions of customers, many of whom would describe "being a Harley Davidson owner" as a part of how they fundamentally see, think, and feel about themselves.

implicit associations

malcolm gladwell references the Implicit Association Test web site in his new book Blink.

The IAT was originally developed as a device for exploring the unconscious roots of thinking and feeling. This web site has been constructed for a different purpose -- to offer the IAT to interested individuals as a tool to gain greater awareness about their own unconscious preferences and beliefs.

The tests are really interesting and kind of fun to take.

headline styles

From the design desk at Poynter Online - Today's Headline Styles. The article talks about different types of headline styles and when to use them with a visual comparison of the different treatments using "Waves of Death" from the recent tsunami coverage.

Links to other Poynter articles on headlines:

• Headlines: Bigger is Better
• Center This Headline?
• Hierarchy Within Headlines: Layers of Storytelling

(via drew)

more tips for personas

kim goodwin's new uie article Perfecting Personas offers some good tips to keep in mind when developing personas.

represent behavioral patterns, not job descriptions

A persona answers critical questions that a job description or task list doesn’t, such as: Which pieces of information are required at what points in the day? Do users focus on one thing at a time, carrying it through to completion, or are there a lot of interruptions? Why are they using this product in the first place?

keep your set small

Ideally, you should have only the minimum number of personas required to illustrate key goals and behavior patterns. … The important distinctions among personas are behavioral, not demographic.

marketing and sales targets may not be the same as your design targets

If you were designing an in-flight entertainment system, a frequent business traveler—every airline’s most valued customer—would be a tempting design target. A business traveler would actually make a poor design target, though, because she would be too familiar with flying and with using computers and other gadgets. If you design for the business traveler, the retired bricklayer going to see his grandchildren won’t be able to use the system. If you design for the bricklayer, you may need to add a little something extra to satisfy the business traveler, but the bulk of the interaction will satisfy them both.

keep the personal details to a minimum

Personal details can be fun to come up with, but if there are too many of them they just get in the way. To avoid this problem, focus first on the behavior patterns, goals, environment, and attitudes of the persona—the information that’s critical for design—without adding any personality.

use the right goals

Most persona goals should be end goals that focus on what the persona could get out of using a well-designed product or service. End goals may involve the work product that results from using the tool. For example, a graphic designer using a layout tool might want to create an award-winning ad. End goals can also involve indirect benefits from using a product. If a manager wants to be more proactive, a better spreadsheet tool can help her achieve this goal if it makes her more efficient.

should be specific to the design problem

Organizations with more than one product often want to use the same personas over and over ("We have a salesperson persona already—why can’t we use her for the spreadsheet as well as the contact management software?"). Unfortunately, this doesn’t work because effective personas must be context-specific—they should be focused on the behaviors and goals related to the specific domain of a product.

sometimes innovation ain't pretty

Fast Company article on the design chief for European auto-maker Renault.

In a move to "jump-start" the company, Renault hired Patrick le Quement. Since then Renault has scored huge hits and the Megane has overtaken the VW Golf in western Europe.

Before he took the job, le Quement demanded structural changes in the role of design at Renault. For starters, he told Levy, his department would no longer answer to engineering. Stylists were told they would become full-fledged designers, active from the initial concept to the manufacturing phase. Outside consultants were nixed, and the design team was doubled to more than 350 people. The department took a seat on the executive board. And le Quement answers to no one but the chairman.

le Quement's do not please everyone but according to a J.D. Power and Associates survey, cars garnering love/hate versus lukewarm reactions "sell quicker and at a higher profit margin".

The first test of Renault's commitment to risk-taking design came with le Quement's Twingo, a tiny, boxy car to which he added a playful pair of frog's eyes for headlights. Focus groups, he recalls, weren't keen. "Fifty percent of consumers said they hated it, and 25% were dubious," says le Quement. "But 25% said they loved it and wanted to know where they could buy one."

Still smarting from le Quement's shake-up, Renault's engineers and product planners demanded he tone down the Twingo. Le Quement sent a note to his chairman. "The greatest risk is not to take any risks, and I ask you to vote for instinctive design against extinctive marketing," it read. Levy's reply? "I agree." The Twingo was an instant hit in 1992, and the spark for nearly 20 influential concept cars over the next decade.

From le Quement's recipe for getting an organization to embrace design:

Build on existing strengths. Renault had a strong record of innovation before le Quement joined. The Renault 4 was the world's first hatchback, the R8 broke ground with four disc brakes, the R16 had a totally modular interior, and the Espace was the first MPV (multipurpose vehicle) in Europe. "They weren't pretty cars, but they were inspired and intelligent," le Quement says.

But don't keep repeating yourself. Respect for the past doesn't mean being stuck in it. "Anything retro is retrograde. It's driving while looking in the rearview mirror, admitting you've run out of ideas."

Make sure your organization recognizes the intellectual weight of design. "We publish books, write reports, and make films so that we have the intellectual presence to participate in the debate."

Expose your ideas. "Concept cars are of extraordinary importance to us. They're a reservoir of ideas that allow us to establish the furthest point of our frontiers and the direction we're going. And they're fabulous accelerators of innovation. Some people say it's crazy to expose our latest design thinking, but concept cars are of as much importance within the company as outside."

intuitive design

jared spool article, inspired from a discussion on IxD-Discuss: What Makes a Design Seem 'Intuitive'?

for a user to complete a task with an interface they begin with a "current knowledge point", the knowledge they currently have, and they need to arrive at a "target knowledge point", the knowledge they need to complete the task. different users will have different beginning and end points and the same user will also have different beginning and end points depending on the task and their continued use of the interface.

plotting these points on a continuum to find the space between, called "The Knowledge Gap", can help determine where you need to design:

The Knowledge Gap is where design happens. We don’t need to design to the left of current knowledge point, because it’s all stuff the user already knows. And we don’t need to design stuff to the right of the target knowledge point, since the user won’t be needing that information (for this task, at least). We only need to design the interface for the space in between current knowledge and target knowledge.

designers work to close this gap through 1) training (help text, etc.) and 2) reducing complexity.

The biggest challenge in making a design seem intuitive to users is learning where the current and target knowledge points are. What do users already know and what do they need to know? To build intuitive interfaces, answering these two questions is critical.

research & design

a very heated and fantastic discussion on UX-Discuss in early December that I'm just getting around to finishing on the role of research in design.

random bits I liked from the perspective of being an IxDer:

• research comes before design and informs it, it is not part of design
• research and design are separate, interdependent tasks
• research can help to increase the confidence of a design but there may not be time in a project to do enough research. designers oftentimes have to rely on their own knowledge and experiences, parts of which may have come from past research tasks.
• research may be tied to a specific project in mind or it could be relevant to future projects
• one person may perform both roles or it may be separate people

Lada Gorlenko provided quotes from a report titled Innovation through people-centred design - lessons from the USA on integrating designers into the research process:

A powerful mechanism used in research is integrating designers in fieldwork. Being able to observe first hand, rather than reading findings, [...] can have an enlightening effect on the design team. The observation notes made by designers are often different, but complementary, to those made by ethnographers, as both disciplines absorb different events. These corresponding points of view can help to enrich the team's understanding of people for design and can lead to more effective translation of insights into solutions.