User Experience Design Blog

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?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 3:02 pm and is filed under All User Experience Design, Current Events.