Logan Airport Shuttle Terminals

Notice the fine print:

• Delta/Northwest is in terminal A except International Arrivals (similarly for American and JetBlue)
• Under International Arrivals: JetBlue is there, for Mexico arrivals only

The question is should it really be this difficult to know where to go in an airport? I’d love to hear other similar experiences people have had. Feel free to comment below.

“It’s the total experience that matters. And that starts from when you first hear about a product… experience is more based upon memory than reality. If your memory of the product is wonderful, you will excuse all sorts of incidental things.”
- Don Norman, 2008

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”
- Steve Jobs

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
- Charles Mingus

“Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.”
- Paola Antonelli, 2001

“Good [experience design] practitioners know what their job really is: to spread customer-centered thinking throughout the organization.”
- Mark Hurst, 2009

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
- Steve Jobs, 2003

“A personality trait describes the way people behave in a given situation. [... As] soon as we design anything that behaves in a particular way, it has a personality. Even if we never thought about it that way.”
- Don Norman, 2005

“Great design thinkers observe the world in minute detail. They notice things that others do not and use their insights to inspire innovation.”
- Tim Brown, 2008

“Good design is self-evident and needs little or no change or further criticism.”
- Charles Hoffmann

Jones writes:

“Because your site’s content mediates customer relationships, it offers an opportunity to deepen those relationship,”

and

“… content that supports customer relationships is not merely documentation or filler or marketing blast or user interface. It is an extension of a company’s best people. Viewing content in this way implies that content should, among other things

• sound human, not machine-like
• be helpful
• have an appropriate tone
• reflect social norms such as politeness
• represent the company’s personality and values”

The article gives various examples of delighting users through content to enrich the customer’s experience. Finally, Jones encourages us to “… view content less as a means of transacting relationships and more as an opportunity to make them flourish.”

1. Observation and data gathering on a global scale on perspectives of personalization.
2. Exploration of concepts and prototypes, including free-form design from customers.
3. Validation and testing of the proposed homescreen.

This is a very simple process that lead to much understanding and gave sound direction to the team. They discovered the extensive appeal of customization and flexibility. After all, this is a communication device and no two people are exactly alike. One thing I appreciated is that the exploration they did included observing people create their own homescreens, and listening to each person’s disntinct requirements. These tidbits may not always end up in the final design of a mass-market product, but they help to shape what it will and won’t be, and give invaluable insight into the end user’s needs.

An ideal home screen

Nokia also released a 6 minute video that features partial interviews with the creators of the phone. It is certainly a well-produced, marketing video, but dive right in if you’re interested.

Design Considerations for Touch UI

This article enumerates five major pointers for designing effective touch interfaces, namely:

1. Design for immediate access
2. Keep gestures smart and simple
3. Leverage clear mental models
4. Design for real hand sizes
5. Touch feedback is key

See the full article or summary video.

Evaluating Gesture Usability

Kevin Arthur, whose site is dedicated to touch interface usability, shares a rough draft for evaluating gestures. He advocates for the need to have “reliable and repeatable evaluation techniques for gestures,” applicable to all forms of touch: touchpad, touchscreens, and free-form. The draft outlines some distinctions of gestures:

• Gestures are inter-related.
• Gesture interfaces typically don’t have affordances.
• Gestures don’t just need to work — they need to not work when they’re not supposed to.
• For touch gestures things like finger size and fingernails can make a very big difference so it’s important that the test participants are representative.

I agree that there are greater considerations in testing gestures, particularly around learnability, feedback, consistency, and accuracy.

Follow the developing article.

Norman mentions:

• “Know your users” - it’s still the most fundamental principle of design
• The importance of terminology. He prefers the term people not users.
• The essence of experience design is people’s memory. Every interaction contains good and bad, but it’s the final impression that matters.
• There is a huge need for UX professionals to consider their audience: not the user, but clients and businesses. He advocates that we should “learn to speak the language of business,” including using numbers to sell our ideas.

Don Norman | UX Week 2008 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Folding Kyocera Concept Phone (Image courtesy http://pikchur.com/sqc)

Other concept phones included a pair of watch phones from LG and ZTE Technologies, a Chinese mobile company. ZTE’s watch phone is called the Neutrano and features, among other things, a USB modem.

The Neutrano from ZTE Technologies (Photo courtesy of Wired)

The full Wired post can be found at http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/04/concept-phones.html.

Analytics data is useful when it is utilized to measure success of goals and to understand performance issues. The elements of the user experience design field, such as user-centered design and usability paradigms, help to make sense of such data. In addition, while data can measure lack of success, it can not tell provide solutions; it takes a user experience specialist that has training and experience in optimizing such systems to offer potential solutions.

Just as analytics needs user experience design, the UX field also needs analytics. Otherwise, how can we tell that a redesign is effective? Perhaps the new design results in fewer sales, shorter user lifetime, higher bounce rate. There is absolutely no way to know such things without quantitative testing. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I’ve witnessed seasoned experience designers being shocked by the unanticipated shortfalls or successes of their work when put to the test by analytics or other data-driven testing.

ClickZ, a popular information website for digital marketers, has an interesting post about how analytics and user experience design can work together. In the post, the author interviews ClickZ’s own associate director of user experience, Aaron Louie. In the interview, Louie states

[User experience design and analytics] are subservient to higher-level goals. In performance marketing, what drives both analytics and user experience are the business goals and user goals. We ask the fundamental questions: “Why does the site exist?” “What do you want users to do?” and so on. The answers to these questions determine what we design and how we measure the performance of that design….

During discovery, we review the baseline analytics to look for potential problem issues. We then collaborate with the analytics team to conduct the goals analysis, connecting high-level user and business goals to measurable user behaviors. During design, we collaborate with the optimization team to identify and generate design variants for A/B and multivariate testing. And then post-launch, we supplement analytics data with user surveys and usability testing, providing the “why” for the “what.” Then we repeat steps one through four.

I encourage you to read the full interview.

Mobile Experiences Dimensions

1. Core: the fundamentals which support the principle “form follows function”
2. Social: taking advantage of the platform’s intrinsic communication focus
3. Contextual: being aware of physical location (also, based on comments in the article, other applications)
4. Cloud: back-up and optimization
5. Multi-screen: functioning across multiple devices

Thinking of the user’s experience in these dimensions can bring a much more cohesive and useful experience, which I agree will be much more compelling. Of course, each of these elements can be broken down even further, and I think the contextual piece is extremely important.

Looking back at some examples of good mobile design and most visited sites on the mobile web, I can see many of these elements coming though: particularly around social, contextual, and cloud. Multi-screen seems to require the most advancement and attention industry-wide.

Zuverink summarizes well saying, “not all applications need to have all these aspects to be successful, but considering these dimensions may just spark the idea that makes your application great.”

via: Putting People First

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions.

Bowman further writes that in a company such as Google decisions are reduced to simple logic problems relying solely on data for solutions. However, he see the data acting like a crutch, “paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.”

He closes by saying that although he “can’t fault Google for this reliance on data… [he] won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”

Bowman and other visual designers’ recent departures from Google have created somewhat of a stir. Many take issue with the role and respect that visual designers have within a data-driven culture such as Google. However, for me, this has rehashed an everlasting debate that I have had many times with some brilliant individuals about the roles of art and science in functional design. When and to what extent should design be dictated by creativity, uniqueness, divergence as well as art, and when should it be dictated by empirical data and methodologies?

We founded Montparnas on the steadfast belief that data-driven design results in optimal user experiences. I stand by this assertion. However, I also value uniqueness and aesthetics as integral parts of any experience and realize that some projects require more art and less science to create experiences that are emotionally captivating. And while it is easy to measure click-through rates, it is much more difficult to measure brand loyalty and the value of brand fanatics such as many BMW owners.

This is a huge question without a simple answer - only beliefs and stances.