Gender Bias in Tech Products

An article in the Boston Globe last week explores gender bias in tech products and how companies are beginning to “feminize” their products. However, “it would be a mistake to think that designing for women simply means adding sparkles”–rather, it requires that companies put “style and functionality on equal footing with power and speed.” The article quotes Tom Savigar, trends director at The Future Laboratory, saying:

In terms of the fable that geeks shall inherit the earth and he’ll be male–it’s completely wrong, because if you do design a product for a woman, a man, or teenage boy will increasingly buy that and enjoy it better.

Better to Find, than to Search or Browse or Ask

Louis Rosenfeld posted a new article to the Adobe Design Center Think Tank on how people find information on websites. Discussing the differentiation that persists between browsing, searching, and asking, Rosenfeld remarks that separating these functions so discretely does not reflect how our brains actually operate when seeking information. Rosenfeld asserts, “finding is arguably at the center of all user experiences,” and we’ve failed to integrate searching, browsing and asking to help users find.

This lack of integration may be due to a parallel lack of non-digital world examples, the differences between the groups that often own “search,” “browse” and “ask” (IT, marketers, customer service), and the fact that designers can sometimes be complacent, failing to design “holistically.” However, all is not lost. Rosenfeld projects that the continuing use of web analytics in user experience design will help illuminate user behavior for designers. Thus able to see the “winding road between searching, browsing, and asking,” can we begin to make it an easier path to travel.

iPhone Usability Report Released

Last year on World Usability Day, the Scandanavian usability and interaction design firm inUse presented its usability report on the iPhone. With Swedes still awaiting the release of the iPhone, inUse has decided to publish the report on its website. The report includes findings from a usability test of the iPhone against three other phones–the HTC tyTN, Sony Ericsson’s W910i, and the Nokia N95. The iPhone won out with test users and inUse tells us why: most importantly, the iPhone has removed one level of abstraction, allowing users to interact directly with objects on the screen, rather than manipulating keys and watching the screen. inUse concludes, that interaction makes the iPhone transparent, accessible and seductive where those other phones are not.

Montparnas’ weekly news installment posts every Tuesday at lunchtime.

6 Types of Mobile Internet Users

Broadband analyst group Point Topic reports six main types of mobile Internet users: Road warriors, gadget joys, MI lifers, mid-market moderates, entertain us and light & easy. Of these, the newest types to be identified are the mid-market moderates–late-adopters waiting for a compelling reason to use mobile Internet, “entertain us”–young people who use mobile Internet for entertainment, and “light and easy”–primarily older users whose main access to the internet is through mobile devices. The company reports 83% of mobile Internet users fall into these six categories.

Waiting for Interface

Don Norman waxes poetic on the ubiquity of waiting in a breezy new article for Interactions Magazine. Norman connects the dots between waiting and interface and interaction design, writing:

Problems arise at interface, any interface…any place where two entities interact is an interface [where waiting will unavoidably occur], and this is where confusions arise, where conflicting assumptions are born and nourished…[where] mismatched entities struggle to engage.

The article primarily explores instances of waiting and “buffers”–the spaces where waiting occurs when events occur asynchronously, where information and objects are held in stasis while one system waits for another. Norman deems these spaces “a designer’s heaven and the practitioner’s hell.”

Web 2.0 in the Corporate Environment

Although a complete, exacting understanding of “Web 2.0″ may still elude us, a new article on Boxes and Arrows examines why, however nebulous its definition may be, Web 2.0 may fail in the corporate enterprise environment. The article proceeds on four points.

First, Web 2.0 breaks down borders between services, which may present problems for departmentally funded software and IT groups, and the monetization of usage. Second, Web 2.0 utilizes the collective intelligence of its users. In the corporate environment, where competition may trump community, users may be reluctant to contribute their knowledge. (See Herrschaftswissen.)

Third, Web 2.0 cannot control the process of knowledge creation. Companies may not welcome the critical comments to new corporate policies and procedures that may appear on blogs, especially not when their removal would even further alienate employees and make the company look foolish. Worse, blogs and wikis make it ever easier go public with internal debates.

Fourth, Web 2.0 links knowledge and thereby does not protect intellectual property. Quality of service and operational stability are paramount with corporate applications; the “perpetual beta” of online software and the attendant full-time development resources of most Web 2.0 software companies may not be possible in the corporate environment. In addition, software “mash-ups” (think Google Maps and its myriad hacks and overlays) which require the reuse of data may cause trouble in a corporate environment where cost is driven by access to such information.

Conclusion?

Corporate behaviours and processes are not changed just by implementing a new IT service. Installing a blog in a formal and hierarchical corporate culture will not change the company in[sic] an open and informal community. Web 2.0 patterns will only work if the corporate…culture is…responsive to more collaboration and participation or if the implementation is accompanied by other measures to support cultural change.

Montparnas’ weekly news installment posts every Tuesday at lunchtime.

Logo Evolution

Neatorama posted last week on the evolution of company logos. Along with reproductions of the logos through time are brief histories of the name changes, mergers, and executive decisions that framed each adaptation. Companies included: Adobe, Apple, Canon, IBM, Google, LG Electronics, Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox, Nokia, Nortel and Xerox. The post also includes interesting background on things like the Google Doodles, and the reason for the bite out of Apple’s apple. This week, Wired published a more detailed history of how Google got its logo in the first place.

Interactive Election

News outlets turned on all their interactive toys last week with election coverage. During Anderson Cooper’s election coverage on Super Tuesday, CNN unleashed its “magic wall”, a motion-sensitive monitor displaying election data. The New York Times online showed off its Democratic and Republican win maps, with sort features by state, candidate and percentage reporting. More data-rich eye candy exists on the New York Times site in the form of primary calendars that include delegate counts, and charts and graphs of percent-of-vote and delegate win results. NPR.org has its own interactive calendar with win maps by party, and additional delegate total charts. Across the Atlantic, the BBC online got in on the game with an interactive map of the U.S. election race so far, and the “key” races to come, including state-by-state breakdowns of primary results and additional reporting on the potential causes for and events leading up to wins and losses.

Tesler Talks

In an interview, ZDNet’s Editor-in-Chief Dan Farber speaks with Yahoo VP of User Experience and Design, Larry Tesler, about his experiences at Xerox Parc, Apple, Yahoo and the changes and methodologies involved in his work. After an opening discussion of the creation of the GUI at Xerox Parc, Tesler notes that changes to computer user interface would be much more difficult to make now than they were 30 years ago when the industry changed from a green screen command line to the gui–the difference being that there were fewer users on the green screen then than there are on computers now. Tesler and Farber also touch on the methodologies involved in making changes (compromise and leveraging new technologies), and dealing with ‘Tesler’s law’ (though it’s counterintuitive to business, adding time to your schedule that will make a small decrease in a user’s schedule is still beneficial. There will be many users…).

ID/IXD

David Malouf offers thought on the relationship between Industrial Design and Interaction Design on Core77. While ID may have grown out of a more aesthetic consideration, Malouf writes, the burgeoning ubiquity of complex technology in all products requires industrial designers to consider the user interactions that attend product use. At the same time, Malouf points out, Interaction Design is not confined to the realm of digital use, and its principles and theories may be applied to product design broadly. The article closes with a brief history of Interaction Design, and ways to learn about it: academic programs, a brief booklist, and online communities of interaction designers.

The Usual Suspects: Alertbox, Boxes and Arrows, and UIE

User Skills Improving

From the Alertbox, Nielsen reports that users are getting better at moving their mouses, clicking on things, and the basics of search. Though users might be fluent on sites they know, they still trip over new sites, new information architectures, and information overload. To help, Nielsen suggests “handholding and much more simplified content.” Users using search also mainly click on top links, and fail to successfully navigate through bad results, “retarget” search queries, or “properly evaluate” the usefulness of search results.

The research has been a jumping off point for Nielsen and his group to ‘reconfirm guidelines’, namely that email newsletters are still the best way to bring users back to websites, auto-opening new browser windows is still confusing, links that don’t change color after being followed are also still confusing, splash screens and intros still annoy users, it’s not obvious that clicking on a logo will take a user home, people are still wary of giving out personal information on a business website before they’re “sufficiently” committed to the site, and non-standard scrollbars make people miss the extra offerings. Afterall, Nielsen writes, “Interface conventions exist for a reason.”

Search Behavior Patterns

Boxes and Arrows has a new article on the behavior patterns of people using search. Factors that affect this behavior include: domain expertise, search experience, cognitive style (global to analytical thinkers), goal type (navigation, information, transaction), mode of seeking, and situational idiosyncrasies (like mood).

These factors then play out through personas in six broad patterns: alternating between search and browse, minimizing the results set, surveying quickly, making immediate judgments, agonizing over the query, and finally, pogosticking–clicking on several results quickly before going back and settling on one.

Design Deliverables

Want to ease the transition from design to development? Jared Spool at User Interface Engineering writes an article on three main points: 1) Get everyone on the same page, and don’t forget to communicate the “priority of the different design elements”, the “subtle interactions”, and the “rigor of the design rationale”– what can be changed, and what should not be changed, in development. 2) “Reduce development costs.” Spool suggests running prototypes against a good set of use cases. 3) Make “edge conditions explicit”–formalize what could go wrong, and address those scenarios with a “values list”, or guiding themes of the design. As in, “We don’t want our users to feel stupid.”

Another Set of Usual Suspects: Microsoft, Yahoo and Google

Last week, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion in cash and stock. Google implied the merger will ruin the internet. Is this payback?

Montparnas’ weekly news installment posts every Tuesday at lunchtime. Don’t forget to vote.

“Small Pond, Smart Fish”

The latest from Coroflot’s Creative Seeds blog contends that Design Capitals are “rarely the best locations to start a career.” Rather than eking out a living in some of the most expensive cities in the world, going deeper into debt, at a temporary internship getting “small pieces of pick-up work”–why not go somewhere “less sexy”, where you have a better chance to develop the “solid, concept-to-market pieces that make a portfolio shine?” The author, speaking from his own experience, notes, not only had all the senior designers he knew in New York City gotten their start somewhere else, but most of the alumni he’d kept in touch with had followed a progression similar to his: away from Design Capitals.

Ask E.T.: Tufte on the iPhone

Edward Tufte offers some insight into his opinion on the iPhone interface with a new video and some still-land material out of his 1997 book, Visual Explanations. By increasing “information resolution”, reducing “computer admin debris”, integrating “text, images and video” in a “flat, non-hierarchical interface”, and replacing “spacious icons with tight words,” Tufte explains, “the metaphor for the interface is the information. Thus the iPhone got it mostly right.”

Montparnas’ weekly news installment posts every Tuesday at lunchtime.

Many clients are excited by radical user experience redesigns; few realize that radical redesigns are not always warranted and often pose potentially grievous problems for users.

Throughout my career I have been involved in a number of projects that called for a ‘radical redesign’ of an existing product or service. To their credit, those clients realized that they needed to surpass the status quo to gain a competitive advantage and were willing to embark on a profoundly new direction to do so. Yet this desire to drastically change a product or service must be balanced against the difficulty users may face in adjusting to, learning, and evaluating those new experiences. Generally speaking, the more radical the redesign is, the greater the possibility that users will not accept the new version.

Every redesigned facet of the user experience must be processed, understood and internalized by users; this requires users to expend energy. At the same time, users are only willing to invest energy if they see that the action will generate a worthwhile benefit. That means three things. First, each desired change to the user experience really must be an improvement for the users. Second, it must be clearly communicated to the user that each change is meant to benefit them. This can be as simple as listing the changes and explaining how they are enhancements. Third, great pains must be taken to ensure that each change is easy to learn.

Another consequence that must be taken into account is the anxiety that a redesign, by being a departure from the familiar, may cause. This unease can be caused by a number of concerns such as a fear of making critical errors in a new interaction environment, an apprehension of learning a new system, or an uncertainty that the new version will still do what the user requires.

The last point is illustrated by a recent personal incident. The online project management software that our firm uses made big changes to its user experience. In the process of trying to improve the product, however, it swapped a simple task list for more robust and complicated feature. We have not yet adopted the new version because we are afraid that it will no longer fulfill our needs.

These effects on users have real, measurable business impacts. When considering extreme changes to an existing user experience, one must recognize that the client has worked very hard to win current customers (users). One must also understand that with every redesign, even a subtle one, those valuable users may abandon the product or service because they may not accept changes to something with which they are familiar. It may be that the changes will, in fact, be beneficial to them in the long run, but they just do not want to give up something that they already know and understand.

The business impacts of a radical redesign may also extend to the effectiveness of a service of profitability of a product. For example, if a ecommerce company drastically redesigns their checkout process in a way that is hard to understand and in a way that is imposing to the users, fewer may actually go through the check out process and sales may be lost.

In addition, creating a user experience that is a great departure from the previous version may lead users to explore competitors. One powerful factor in users’ loyalty is the comfort of a familiar product or service. If the familiarity is no longer there, there is less to keep customers from straying to competitors.

Prospective customers have slightly different challenges than existing customers. They are more likely to be wowed by big changes to a user experience, and marketing folk are very adept at leveraging these improvements as attractive qualities to the customer (user); however, a prospective customer has the daunting task of evaluating a product or service that he or she wishes to adopt. If a product of service drastically changes, the context for that evaluation may be temporarily lost. In other words, while the new version is adopted and evaluated, there will be less such consumer information, like reviews, during that period.

Beyond making the service or product temporarily harder to evaluate, there is another common challenge. The prospective user may hold off on adopting a new product or service until all the ‘kinks’ are worked out. The perception is that the bigger the change in user experience from one version to the next, the greater the number of kinks.

Although there are real challenges and dangers associated with sweeping user experience redesigns, they are sometimes warranted and necessary. One does not want to be too conservative in one’s redesign if there are major issues to resolve or if big changes can set the client apart from competition. If the user experience strategy dictates that a radical redesign is needed, steps must be taken to ensure that existing users can easily convert to the new version and that users understand the benefits of all those changes.

In my next article, ‘Dealing with Radical User Experience Redesigns‘, I discuss how to successfully implement radical redesigns.

Neglect Advanced Search, Never More

A new article on Boxes and Arrows calls advanced search “an under-utilized tool hampered by its own design.” “Normal” people don’t use it. The “old framing” of search versus advanced search, of “geeks versus normal people”, is prohibitive and doesn’t allow users to tackle the problem of too many results. The result? Users have to search correctly the first time or start over. To give users advanced search options when they realize they need them, Boxes and Arrows suggests: ‘related item’ tagging, like Amazon, faceted search, like eBay, filtering, like Kayak, and the progressive disclosure of more advanced search functions.

Qualities of Feeling: Fluency in Interaction Design

A paper in the newest International Journal of Design explores the notion of “Fluency as an Experiential Quality in Augmented Spaces.”

Author Jonas Löwgren writes that as human computer interactions have moved from work use to “hedonistic” use, the field must consider not only the efficiency of a digital product, but also how a user will feel about the use of it. Löwgren proposes fluency as a quality of feeling.

The paper broadly defines fluency as “the degree of gracefulness with which the users deal with multiple demands for their attention or action.” Gracefulness is increased in products that “respect” the rhythms of social norms and practices, or require only peripheral attention while maintaining readability for when a user is ready to engage. Examples of this: Quiet Calls, the Marble Answering Machine, and the Stock Orb.

Out of the Lost Decade: Usability ROI Declining

Jakob Nielsen reports that Usability ROI has declined from 135% to 83% in the past six years due to reduced benefits and steady cost. Nielsen cites our movement out of the “‘lost decade’ of Web usability”, in which it was “easy for usability people to be heroes,” as direct cause for reduced benefits. Looking forwards, Nielsen titles this decade the “Conversion Decade,” where Usability ROI may be largely dependent on the rate of conversion from visitor to customer, and 2010-2020, the “Loyalty Decade.” Adapting to this evolution will require increasingly in-depth field research to fortify lab testing. Costs will go up. Thankfully, though, Nielsen writes:

Current usability ROI is so stupendously big (spend 10% to gain 83%) that it can decrease much more and still be a favorable proposition for business executives.

Montparnas’ weekly news installment posts every Tuesday at lunchtime.

Engagement in Web Metrics

Print advertisers buy space. Broadcast advertisers buy time. We used to measure the success of online ads by page views. The Washington Post this week suggests that given multi-tasking users and the rise of development techniques like Ajax, a better measure of success would be to develop new metrics, like “engagement”–a way to “’see’ what applications or sites users are interacting with”, not just how long a page was open on screen. Then, not only would the metrics help publishers and developers “do a better job of giving consumers the kind of Web content they want,” they would also provide a “direct means of…[user] feedback about how [they]…spend their most precious resource online — their time.”

Against Design Thinking, Towards Politics

A recent article in In These Times takes to task the notion of design thinking as a ‘cure to social ills’. Likening design thinking to the modernist design movement of the last century–out of which emerged such failures as the Chicago high-rise public housing projects–author Alix Rule criticizes ‘design thinking’ as a “naïve progressivism” which relies on a “moment in the pursuit of social good that hardly ever arrives: when all the hearts are in the right place, all opinions have been brought into line and all that needs to happen is the change itself.”

While Rule admits that the design thinking of this century differs from the “arrogant and antidemocratic” design thinking of the last century by being “user-centered and participatory”, the point is “if the model has intellectual benefits, it’s doubtful they outweigh the deficiencies of ignoring the long process by which consensus is built—a.k.a. politics.”

Despite Rule’s castigation of design thinking’s pragmatism, as CNET blogger Tim Leberecht points out, Rule’s argument “disregards the impact of incrementalism, of those baby-steps and micro-innovations which may…instigate change on a mundane, practical level.”

MySpace Social Networking Safety Standards

Monday, MySpace announced a set of safety standards aimed at protecting minors. For the past year, MySpace has been under fire as “a towering danger to kids” from the “Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking”, a growing organization of state Attorney Generals. The plan has four “pillars” standardizing content review, parental tools, online law enforcement, and internal safety taskforces. The safety standards are designed as industry standards.

Montparnas’ weekly news installment posts every Tuesday at lunchtime.

In the tradition of the New Year, best-of lists and some things to look forward to…

Ten Best Intranets 2008

From the Alertbox, Mr. Nielsen reports the Ten Best Intranets of 2008. Half the winners are from the U.S., among them Bank of America, Barnes and Noble, Campbell Soup and Coldwell Banker. The financial industry is strongly represented with three winners, while the technology sector produced only one winner, SAP AG. Features of these best sites include prominent, feature-rich company news sections, improved day-to-day productivity support and knowledge management, and overall improved integration.

Sign-In Design: Mistakes to Avoid

Using Cisco Systems‘ online “Marketplace” as an example of what not to do, Jared Spool gives the run down on eight mistakes to avoid when designing sign-on pages. The lesson in brief: Avoid sign-in if you can, don’t require sign-in too soon, state the benefit, make the sign-in prominent, help your users with “I forgot…” buttons, provide sign-in opportunities at key locations, ask as few registration questions as necessary, and, lastly, don’t forget to tell the user how their information will–or will not–be put to use.

Virtual Hosting: The List Bonanza

Over the holiday season, Virtual Hosting published seven new lists. One is charitable: The Top 80 Charities and Open Source/Access Advocates. Two are geeky: 50+ Resources for Computer Science Students and 100 Tools, Tips, Resources for Building Your Own Computer. And several might just help us get back into gear in the New Year: 50 Ways for Web Workers to Bring in More Business, a Video Blogging Toolbox, 30 Google Apps You’ve Never Heard Of, and the Web Stats Motherload.

Usability and User Experience Specialist Named Best Career

Back in mid-December, U.S. News and World Report included “Usability/User Experience Specialist” in its list of 31 “Best Careers 2008.” The article reports the career to have a median income of $98,000 and that professionals will be in high demand, given that the “number of new, complex products is proliferating.” Careers were selected for the list on the basis of both qualitative and quantitative criteria: job satisfaction, training difficulty, prestige, job market outlook and pay.

Though any publicity may be good publicity, there are those on the Interaction Design Association discussion board who take issue with the U.S. News article. Points of the argument: that the high median pay would fluctuate greatly depending on experience, training and geographic location, that the use of the term “specialist” and the generality of the job description are inaccurate, and that the Day-in-the-Life section excludes the design aspect of user experience work.

Blackberry Keyboard: Breaking the Crackberry Habit?

CNET news reports that Research in Motion has filed a patent with the USPTO for an angled Blackberry keyboard. The new keyboard may help alleviate hand and wrist pain, if it can convince users to learn a new method of text-entry.

Consumer Electronics Show 2008

The Consumer Electronics Show kicked off this Monday in Las Vegas. Forbes offered a preview last week, namedropping speechmakers Bill Gates, Brian Roberts of Comcast, Paul Otellini of Intel, and Rick Wagoner of GM. Since MacWorld is next week, Forbes also reports, Steve Jobs will not be in attendance.

The New York Times offered insight yesterday into the size of the show, observing that since “technology has wormed its way into so many products…it’s hard to say exactly what an electronics trade show should be about.” “It is as much of a place to get lost as to get discovered.”

Notable items at the show include a phone running Google’s Android mobile software platform, the Sony Rolly robot, and a 150″ Panasonic plasma television. CNET’s coverage picks out the XstreamHD media server, Yahoo Go 3.0, and a Bug Labs build-your-own-dream-gadget platform among highlights so far. CNET Best in Show winners will be announced on Wednesday.

Last But Not Least: Interactions Magazine

Interactions Magazine relaunched itself this month with a new website to complement its print edition. Contributors for the January and February issue include Don Norman, Steve Portigal on Personas, Elizabeth Churchill on “Idioms, Metaphors and Design”, and Hugh Dubberly on Innovation. Expect full articles to be posted soon.

Montparnas’ weekly news installment posts every Tuesday at lunchtime.

On November 7th, 2007, RollingStone published an interview with William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and the man who coined the term ‘cyberspace’. In the interview, Gibson suggests that one of the “challenges” we will face is the prospect of ubiquitous computing. He prophesizes:

One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible.

Richard Titus, now acting head of user experience at the BBC and executive producer of Who Killed the Electric Car, responded to the RollingStone interview on his blog. He wrote:

The net today is a thing we can only take brief momentary snapshots of, like photos out of a moving vehicle - in fact that’s really what widgets are are [sic] special cameras which allow us to capture some of the data running around the net into a single, momentary user experience.

Inspired by the comments of William Gibson and Richard Titus, and in the spirit of the season, of people coming together, this week’s News Round-Up takes a look at things coming together: “widgets” and innovations that break the boundary between the virtual and the real, bringing us into a state of perma-connectivity…

Need a New Phone? TryPhone beta

Forbes.com reports a new interactive service called “TryPhone.” The service allows cellular phone shoppers to try out phone interfaces online. Among featured phones available for test drive are the popular Apple iPhone and the BlackBerry Pearl. Although it could be more interactive and offer more phones, the service, created by MobileComplete, debuted in beta on Monday, December 10.

E-tools for E-Retailers

In a similar vein, if completely different industry, Internet Retailer brings us news of features e-retailers are offering in order to help customers get closer to the merchandise. New site features like Coach.com’s “Try This Bag On”, 6pm.com’s “Fit Survey”, and Gap.com’s “Quick Look” allow users to get a better idea of how the goods will look and feel on their person. Good news for holiday gift-buying?

BetaBlue

This week, JetBlue became the first U.S. domestic carrier to offer free in-flight e-mail and instant messaging services. Through a partnership with Yahoo!, Research in Motion, and LiveTV, JetBlue’s “BetaBlue”, an Airbus A320 equipped with onboard wireless network, took its inaugural flight this Tuesday morning. Cnet News blogger Caroline McCarthy had the chance to write from this flight. Not to be outdone by the competition, American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines are reported to have plans to offer Web access in the next several months, for a cost of around $10 a flight.

Thanks to UXnet for the reference to ubiquity. News Round-Up will return on January 8th, 2008.

Happy Holidays.