Usability is NOT a technical problem

Designing usable applications is a multi-disciplinary problem, the heart of which is a people problem. Designers and developers need to understand their users, and customers.

Frans Englich wrote an article for Newsforge called Open source usability is a technical problem we can solve on our own -- and it's an amazing read. It's amazing to me how horribly misunderstood the basic premise of usability is in some areas of the Linux community. I have noticed the folks working on the usability teams seem to be headed in the right direction, although I haven't look at it in depth.

Linux and Open Source have a huge constraint that make usability a difficult to acheive goal: lack of leadership. Let me add: lack of strategy, lack of measurement, lack of clarity -- too many voices are considered at all times, and solid decisions are never really made...not for long.

Here are some horribly wrong statements from Frans' article (and my comments in bold):

1) "For some reason, we treat it [usability] as a mystery instead of looking at it as a problem we can solve the same way we solve all other technical problems."

Sure, the way to solve your problems is to use the same flawed process you used to get into them.

2) "Even if we decide to rely on outside experts to solve our usability problems, they are going to find it impossible to keep up with us. The KDE project alone has an average of 200 checkins to its code repository each day. There aren't enough outside usability specialists available to correct all the errors that are inevitable with this level of productivity."

So he's saying 'We're making too much "progress" to worry about fixing all the errors we're making at this level of "productivity"! Let's be honest here, he's really saying "We don't want to slow down, get organized and do it better the first time...after all, the proper measure of productivity is of course the number of code changes checked in every day."

3) "One of the advantages of open source is its ability to put the consumer ahead of profit. Our goal is to produce great software while honoring the user's privacy, rights, and freedom. When usability, central to everything in today's software, is outsourced to companies, the open source community's independence and opportunity to achieve its noble goal is compromised. The open source community must be able to handle all its issues -- including usability -- by itself in order for our development approach to give maximum benefit to society and the user by constantly advancing our level of technical excellence." .... "We don't need usability reports. We need each developer to devote as little as one single thought to usability."

Okay, now the evidence of heavy Kool-Aid drinking is pretty obvious. This one's so convoluted it's amazing. So the "noble goal" of "putting the consumer ahead of profit" is better served by not paying evil "companies" (god forbid) to identify the consumer, understand their needs and deliver them a better product. Right... The consumer is *definitely* put "ahead" when you rationalize your decision to not practice user-centered design... This is like a non-profit organization deciding that tax and finance consultants are evil because they bill for their time - and then calling for their volunteers to just "think about taxes for one minute."


Design is a skill, an area of knowledge, a craft, a realm where experience matters. Design is also fun, and designers have power -- often people just don't want to share the reins with anyone else, even if those other folks are better suited to that role on the team. And to reiterate: designer is just a role on a much larger team.

How do companies running Linux request new features?

An article in LinuxWorld asks a great question: What About the Linux End Users?

"If Linux were a proprietary operating system, then companies such as Gillette and Staples who might want to use Linux to run mission-critical applications would make any queries or requests to the vendor. But who looks after them in the Linux world, asks Dr. Bill Claybrook - how do such companies get the features that they want included in Linux?"

Side note: The design of the "regular" version of this article on the LinuxWorld site is horrible. I clicked to this story from Google News and had a hard time finding the actual story content. Yuck! There's so much other stuff at the top of the page that the content I came for is far below "the fold." They also have an iconic toolbar below the story's title that has a "Read Story" link. Clicking on that actually takes you AWAY from the story you just fought so hard to find. How exactly does that help you read the story?

Related posts:
- Misuse of (Linux) usability report findings continues
- Linux needs focus not whiners
- Open Letter to a Power User / Developer (Linux related)
- Usability and Open Source Software
- Confessions of a Mozillian

Fudgability is next to Usability

A good post from the blog Kasei tells the story of a system so over-engineered that users couldn't use it. It's a good lesson in the KISS principle.

The Importance of Fudgability

"In any human process there's always a degree to which the outcome can be fudged by the person performing the task. Even when the rules are simple or well-understood, there are always cases when someone will have a compelling reason to do things differently. In this case we didn't even know all the rules, and discovered to our horror that there were many more edge-cases than we'd imagined."

Good Food, Good Life, Bad Site

The Nestle corporate web site gets my vote for bad site of the day...maybe the week. I haven't seen a site quite this bad for some time. Where do you start? I could spend hours critiquing all the basic flaws (i.e. breaking widely known web usability and design standards) in this site.

Check out these pages (and issues):
- Media Centre (frames, hidden-in-plain-sight Search box placement, link colors, headquarters map)

- Home Page (what's clickable?)

- Download Kiosk (can you say "Fitt's"?)

- Internet Directory (can't see the forest for the trees and the flash)

- Country Access (nice icons by the phone #'s!)

- Careers Site Site Map (it's spelled C.O.N.T.R.A.S.T)

- Investor Relations - The designers and authors of the site show nothing but contempt for their content, not to mention their investors and other audiences by shoehorning content into little porthole-like frames and pop-up windows with ghastly PowerPoint slides shrunk down to thumbnail size. Someone there needs to read a bit of Tufte for enlightenment!


Okay, I've got to quit now...but someone at Nestle should give Rolf Molich or another decent usability consultant a call -- right after they fire their horrible design firm.

Defibrillator Maker claims FDA warnings about quality don't relate to usability, safety or efficacy

A statement in a short Reuters article (Cardiac Science Gets FDA Warning on Quality) struck me as a good example of a corporate PR group trying to spin bad press. Here's an excerpt (emphasis is mine):

"Cardiac Science Inc., a defibrillator maker, said on Wednesday that it received a warning letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration following an inspection of its manufacturing facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The FDA letter ... said certain procedural and documentation items in the company's quality system were not in compliance, the company said in a statement. The letter did not relate to the usability, safety or efficacy of the company's defibrillators, the firm said."

So what they are REALLY saying is the FDA warned them about problems with their quality process. The FDA didn't point out any exact issues with their products. Of course, the process is what leads to (i.e., designs, tests, and approves) the products, but that's just a minor point, right?

Search Best Bets & Reporting on Search Log Data

Looking for a way to process your search logs (data files that keep a record of each search query performed on a web site)? Check out this helpful article from Jean Ferguson, a Masters student at UNC: Counting frequency in a list of search terms. It does a nice job of explaining how to get Excel to show you your most popular search terms.

If you're managing your search engine, you should keep track of the most popular terms and make sure that people will find relevant results when searching for those terms. Search term popularity follows a "zipf distribution" (think 80/20 or pareto principle), so you get the most bang for your buck by focusing on the most popular search queries. Some search tools allow you to manually point users to "best bets" for a given search term. Here's an example for a search for "support" on the Novell site. Here's another example from the BBCi site - a search for "politics."

See also:
- Lou Rosenfeld, Bloug: 80/20 Again—Critical Architectural Junctures
- Lou Rosenfeld, Presentation called Search Log Analysis for User Research (.5 MB PowerPoint file) given to a local UPA chapter.
- Tanya Rabourn, Pixelcharmer: Best Bets. (Great example of real data from a real site.)
- James Robertson, Column Two: Search tools articles
- Richard Wiggins, Searcher Magazine: Beyond the Spider: The Accidental Thesaurus
- Avi Rappoport, SearchTools.com: Recommending Pages for Special Searches (Covers best bets pretty well with tool suggestions.)

How many navigation bars can you fit on a screen?

Check out this page on the Dell Support site:

Dell Support: Reference Info: User Guides: Dell Printers: Workgroup Laser Printers

I count well over a dozen distinct navigation bars or levels of navigation...

Now click on "Enterprise Support" at the top right (which is not a distinct label from "Support Home")...you get a dialog box saying "Your current 'Manage My Systems List' will remain on this support site while you visit the Enterprise Support site." It tells me nothing worthwhile - I didn't know I had such a 'list,' and now I'm confused. I also noted that while the message seems to indicate I won't lose the place I'm leaving, the Back button doesn't function properly once I get to Enterprise Support.

...I smell a few silos somewhere...

Got any more examples of nav bar overload? Send them to me at Lyle_Kantrovich at Bigfoot dot com (replace the words with the usual punctuation).

Related Posts:
- Segmenting Users with Navigation Games
- Dell.com design case study

NASA Researching new input technology that may improve accessibility

"NASA has developed a computer program that comes close to reading thoughts not yet spoken, by analyzing nerve commands to the throat. It says the breakthrough holds promise for astronauts and the handicapped.

"A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain," said developer Chuck Jorgensen, of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. Jorgensen's team found that sensors under the chin and one each side of the Adam's apple pick up the brain's commands to the speech organs, allowing the subauditory, or "silent speech" to be captured.

'A logical spin-off would be that handicapped persons could use this system for a lot of things,' he said, as well as persons wanting to speak by telephone without being overheard."

[Via Yahoo! News]: Yahoo! News - NASA hears words not yet spoken

More:
- NASA - SUBVOCAL SPEECH DEMO PHOTOS
- NASA - NASA DEVELOPS SYSTEM TO COMPUTERIZE SILENT, 'SUBVOCAL SPEECH'

JetBlue founder & CEO takes time to serve customers - in flight

Inc magazine has a nice story of how a company's CEO takes time each month to serve customer and motivate his team.

Full Story:
Inc.com | Street Smarts: Learning From JetBlue:

"by keeping in touch, he gets a real-time sense of the market. He knows first hand what's going on out there, and he'll see trends before his competitors. That's one of the biggest advantages of having direct contact with customers. Markets change. Technologies change. Customer wants and needs change. If you have your finger on the pulse of the market, you're a step ahead of the competition. If you don't, you run the risk of getting blind-sided.
In addition, he's shaping the company culture. Employees see him working the crowd, going out of his way to help a customer, and they do the same. They hear him talking about the plans to introduce new services, and they spread the word. Above all, they know that Neeleman isn't sitting behind a desk somewhere counting his stock options. He's putting in overtime, and he's doing it with them. They can rest assured that he understands what's happening on the frontlines because he's been there. He's on their team."

Beyond Bookmarks & Powermarks

A New York Times article called Now Where Was I? New Ways to Revisit Web Sites talks about new research being done to help users find useful web pages after some time has elapsed.

"Software being tested at Microsoft Research takes a stab at solving that problem. Susan Dumais, a senior researcher with Microsoft who is also part of the University of Washington team, has helped develop a program called Stuff I've Seen. The software is designed to help people recall documents like e-mail messages and Web sites through a unified search interface. Keyword search results include related Web sites already visited, regardless of whether they have been bookmarked."


Frequent COL readers might recall I have an affinity for Powermarks. So far, it's still the best I've found for this sort of recall task.


Related:
- Stuff I've Seen - A System for Personal Information Retrieval and Re-Use (SIGIR Paper in PDF format)
- COL: Who needs bookmarks?

B2B e-commerce pioneer Staples continues to define the cutting edge

According to a Network World Fusion article, usability studies help Staples stay ahead of the competition:

"By last count, customers that have standing contracts with Staples place 70% of their orders electronically, says Mike Ragunas, vice president of technology strategy and architecture at the Framingham, Mass., office-supply retailer. At least some of those results can be attributed to the company's focus on making it easy for customers to shop at Staples, whether online, in the store or from a catalog. Often that effort involves making Staples.com simple to use."

"Easy Reorder required only relatively simple programming and database work. "The bigger challenge was working with customers on finding the right way to present it," he says. He adds that Staples puts significant effort into usability studies "so when we put something new out, we know customers will get it."


Yes, Staples has usability folks -- a number of them. And the company's bottom line shows the results. Check out this case study.

The SheLingual Woman Translator

More proof that PT Barnum was right when he said there's a sucker born every day:
BowLingual

This made me think of a million dollar idea: "The SheLingual" - a device to translate what women are saying into something men can understand.

Some potential features:
- Gripe Translation: Uses the exclusive YPMS system to analyze what she's saying. Now when you hear "blah, blah, blah, blah" during football games, you can use the "SheLingual" to avoid having to respond with "did you say something sweetie?". And when she's sniping about the laundry, you'll know it's really because you haven't given her flowers in over two years.

- Home Alone Mode: records up to 12 hours of phone chats, gossip, griping and mood swings while you are away.

- Body Language Guide: helps you interpret hand guestures, facial expressions, sighs, snickers, and a variety of hands-on-hips stances. No more asking "what was THAT look for?"

Usability Service with a smile...

...okay, a quirky, possibly scary "The Shining" kind of smile, but a smile nonetheless.

The following is from the home page of Kurt Robinson Usability Consulting. It struck me as funny - but then I have a rather twisted sense of humor (a fact that anyone who reads this site often will atest to). I'm not sure it's the kind of writing style that conveys a sense of credibility or professionalism.

"We rigorously inspect your site, looking for ways to make it quicker and easier for your site's visitors to find things, compare products, check out, subscribe, etc. Beyond that, we look for any opportunity to enhance the user's sense that your company is trustworthy, and that, vaguely speaking, your company has a consistent, likable personality. Failing that, at least try to be likable in your private life. Remember birthdays. Really listen. Play dumb. Put a sock in it.

"The deliverable is a Usability Report - A concise report describing ways to improve the user experience your site provides. In this context, 'the deliverable' has no sexual connotations."

I'd never hire this consultant - not based on their web site. Then again, there's so much obviously wrong with this site that I can't believe they actually expect to get any business from their site.

Of course, maybe they're not targeting folks like me or my clients. If their target market is adolecent boys, maybe this is spot on.

Being funny's great, and I think it can actually help in marketing. Just look at Steve Krug, his book was a huge seller, largely because of his fabulous writing style. But there comes a point when things go too far and turn people away.

It's a good chuckle

Bob's Quick Guide to Its and It's, you idiots

[via Meryl]

Dispelling myths about spam

Rebecca Lieb has an excellent piece at Clickz called The 10 Biggest Spam Myths. If you think "something must be done," then you should read this very informative and eye-opening article.

"Everyone battling the spam scourge -- marketers, consumers, lawmakers, and the media -- could do with a little reason and rationality just about now. It's time to think critically about received ideas on spam."

UIs aren't DIY

Sound & Video Contractor magazine (surprisingly enough) has a nice succinct article on why you shouldn't think of user interfaces as DIY (do-it-yourself).

"The same now holds true for user interfaces. When designing products or services for your customers, don't entrust the task of user interface design to amateurs. Whether you choose to use in-house personnel or consultants, make sure you use someone with experience in designing user interfaces — someone who knows how to find usability problems.

"Why risk alienating a customer because of a poorly designed interface? Many people have heard the buzzword intuitive applied to user interfaces. Make sure the interface is intuitive to the customer who has never used, or has little experience with, your product or service, not the person who just spent the past 24 months developing it."

Read the full article:Don't Try This at Home

Toys R Us and Sexual Assault of Children - Advertisers need to consider content that will surround their ads

I was just reading a current news item on the ABCNews web site (found via Google News headlines) and saw something that advertisers should be aware of when placing ads.

First, a little background: the news story is about how three suspects in a sexual assault case will not be tried as adults, even though the crime they are accused of is quite serious and the accused are all between 16 and 17 years old. Two of the alleged victims are 14 and 13 years old.

This story is being talked about quite a bit here in the states since many suspects in this age group are often charged as adults, but these suspects will be treated as juveniles in the court system. Victims' family members said the judge's ruling Wednesday to treat them as juveniles apparently means the three accused boys will get nothing more than probation and therapy

The ABCNews.com story goes into some details of the accusations over a three-page article on their web site. The first page provides some details of the alleged assault:

"the suspects could have faced 26 felony counts in the incident, in which two 16-year-olds and one 17-year-old allegedly sodomized the younger boys with a broomstick, pine cones and golf balls."

The first page ends just a few paragraphs from this rather graphic explanation. At the top of the second page, there is an in-page ad that you have to view and scroll past to continue reading. In this case, it was an ad for Toys R Us offering their latest catalog, so in big bold letters, the ad offers you "The Big Toy Book". This ad was rather shocking to me as a reader. Here, I'm reading a disturbing piece about young boys allegedly being cruelly sexually assaulted, and then I get a nice big cheery offer for a "big toy book." What are the brand implications for Toys R Us? Did their marketing department really want to associate their brand with sex crimes involving children? I'm sure not.

Tip for advertisers: don't buy advertising on news sites where your brand may be placed next to things with bad connotations. I recall when the movie "Schindler's List" was broadcast on television here in the states. The entire broadcast was sponsored by Ford and, as I recall, the advertising was very solemn and respectful of the content of the movie. It wasn't a time for a fun "Zoom Zoom" style of advertising. It wasn't a case where commercial interruptions of any sort would work - so the broadcast was uninterrupted.

Generally, advertisers should look at solutions like Google's AdSense that contextualizes advertising to the content. But more importantly, they can't look just at a web site's "reach", but must also look at the context in which their ad will be viewed. Advertisers need to consider the brand experience. ABCNews.com may attract the right demographics that Toys R Us was trying to reach, but I'm sure they never wanted their brand or their "Big Toy Book" associated with sodomy or the sexual assault of children.

Placing ads in the midst of content forces a reader to try and associate the ad with what they are reading. Ads should therefore not be place in the middle of content. Ads are almost always separate in content and purpose, and therefore should be kept in a separate "chunk" in the page layout.

As far as I know, Toys R Us is a great company. I shop there all the time. They sell great toys (like this cool mega-sphere). But they need to talk to ABC about where their ads are running if they're going to continue advertising with ABCNews.com.

The Bad Internet Fairy can teach you a lesson

Nick Usborne writes about A Fairy, a Low-Fat Bagel, and a Sack of Hammers in A List Apart. This is a great article about what we have to remember is of primary importance as web designers.

Usborne is the author of Net Words:

Free Web Content

Tired of using "greeked" or "latin" text like "lorem ipsum" on page mockups? Try ungreek.

[Via Meryl]

Study says brain hard-wired for empathy

This may explain why video highlights of usability testing are more convincing than a report...

"Ever watched someone grimace after they sniffed a carton of sour milk? Even though you were spared a whiff of stinky milk, to your brain, you might as well have been sniffing the milk yourself, a report from Italy suggests. New research shows that when we see an expression of disgust on someone else's face, the same part of our brain -- the insula -- is activated as when we feel disgust ourselves.

'People have overemphasized the importance of thoughts in our understanding of others,' Dr. Christian Keysers of the University of Parma, a co-author of the report, told Reuters Health. Although Keysers said that empathy for others is often thought of as a matter of morals, 'in our study, on the other hand, we show that empathy is a very basic, simple and automatic process,' he said. Keysers explained that when we see the emotions on another's face, 'we don't need to think about how that person feels.' Instead, according to Keysers, we share the feeling of disgust because the insula is activated as if we were disgusted ourselves.

'This sharing is automatic,' he said. 'Our subjects were not asked to share the emotion of the other person and did not report attempting to do so after the scan. It just happens.' Keysers continued, 'This shared feeling of disgust could then be our key to understanding how the other person feels.'"

From Reuters Health Information: Brain hard-wired for empathy: study