UsabilityNews

Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.

The survey - of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries - found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide. Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens. International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access.

"The right to communicate cannot be ignored," Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News. "The internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created." He said that governments must "regard the internet as basic infrastructure - just like roads, waste and water. We have entered the knowledge society and everyone must have access to participate."

The survey, conducted by GlobeScan for the BBC, also revealed divisions on the question of government oversight of some aspects of the net. Web users questioned in South Korea and Nigeria felt strongly that governments should never be involved in regulation of the internet. However, a majority of those in China and the many European countries disagreed. In the UK, for example, 55% believed that there was a case for some government regulation of the internet.

THEY are variously known as the Net Generation, Millennials, Generation Y or Digital Natives. But whatever you call this group of young people—roughly, those born between 1980 and 2000—there is a widespread consensus among educators, marketers and policymakers that digital technologies have given rise to a new generation of students, consumers, and citizens who see the world in a different way. Growing up with the internet, it is argued, has transformed their approach to education, work and politics.

“Unlike those of us a shade older, this new generation didn’t have to relearn anything to live lives of digital immersion. They learned in digital the first time around,” declare John Palfrey and Urs Gasser of the Berkman Centre at Harvard Law School in their 2008 book, “Born Digital”, one of many recent tomes about digital natives. The authors argue that young people like to use new, digital ways to express themselves: shooting a YouTube video where their parents would have written an essay, for instance.

Anecdotes like this are used to back calls for education systems to be transformed in order to cater to these computer-savvy students, who differ fundamentally from earlier generations of students: professors should move their class discussions to Facebook, for example, where digital natives feel more comfortable. “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach,” argues Marc Prensky in his book “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”, published in 2001. Management gurus, meanwhile, have weighed in to explain how employers should cope with this new generation’s preference for collaborative working rather than traditional command-and-control, and their need for constant feedback about themselves.

But does it really make sense to generalise about a whole generation in this way? Not everyone thinks it does. “This is essentially a wrong-headed argument that assumes that our kids have some special path to the witchcraft of ‘digital awareness’ and that they understand something that we, teachers, don’t—and we have to catch up with them,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, who teaches media studies at University of Virginia.

On March 8, as the world celebrates International Women’s Day, all eyes were on 31-year old Indrani Medhi when she stepped up to the podium at Emtech 2010 to receive her honour as a technological trendsetter.

Medhi, an Associate Researcher at Microsoft Research India, is the only woman in the sought after India TR35 roll of honours, a list of 20 promising young innovators under 35 handpicked by an eminent jury selected by Technology Review India. The 111-year old technology magazine from MIT unveiled its list at the emerging technologies conference EmTech in Bangalore.

Medhi gets the accolades from the India TR35 jury for her work in helping those who cannot read use mobile phones and PCs easily. A student of design, Medhi has developed text-free user interfaces (UIs) to allow any illiterate or semi-literate person on first contact with a computer, to immediately know how to proceed with minimal or no assistance.

As Medhi points out, in text-based conventional information architecture found in mobile phones and PCs, there is a number of usability challenges that semi-literate people face. By using a combination of voice, video and graphics in an innovative way, Medhi has overcome this challenge. Medhi discovered the kind of barriers that illiterate populations face in using technology through an ethnographic design process involving more than 400 women from low-income, low-literate communities across India, the Philippines, and South Africa. “In addition to the general inability to read text, the other major challenge was the difficulty in navigating hierarchical menus in current information architectures,” says Medhi.

To overcome these barriers, Medhi applied a few key principles: extensive use of hand-drawn, semi-abstracted cartoons with voice annotation in the local language, aggressive mouse-over functionality, a consistent help feature, and looping full-context video dramatizing the purpose and mechanism of the application.

Demonstrating sensitivity in understanding the needs of the illiterate population who will be using this interface, Medhi has applied these principles to design four applications: job-search for the informal labor market, health-information dissemination, a mobile money-transfer system, and an electronic map. A lot of thinking has gone into her design, where she has studied cultural context, motivation and cognitive difficulties before building her framework.

Technology that could see an end to the bane of many commuters - people talking loudly on their mobile phones - has been shown off by researchers. The prototype device could allow people to conduct silent phone conversations.

The technology measures the tiny electrical signals produced by muscles used when someone speaks. The device can record these pulses even when a person does not audibly utter any words and use them to generate synthesised speech in another handset. "I was taking the train and the person sitting next to me was constantly chatting and I thought 'I need to change this'," Professor Tanja Shultz of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology told BBC News. "We call it silent communication."

The device, on show at the Cebit electronics fair in Germany, relies on a technique called electromyography which detects the electrical signals from muscles. It is commonly used to diagnose certain diseases, including those that involve nerve damage. The prototype that is on display in Germany uses nine electrodes that are stuck to a user's face.

"These capture the electrical potentials that result from you moving your articulatory muscles," explained Professor Shultz. "Those are the muscles that you need in order to produce speech." The electrical pulses are then passed to a device which records and amplifies them before transmitting the signal via Bluetooth to a laptop. There, software translates the signals into text, which can then be spoken by a synthesiser.

In the future, said Professor Shultz, the technology could be packed in a mobile phone for instantaneous communication.

GUR-SIG is the worlds first group dedicated to supporting the needs of games user researchers. Its members include researchers from the major platform holders, large publishers, smaller developers, consultancies and individual researchers.

PlayableGames’ manager, Ben Weedon, will be speaking at the first annual summit of the Games User Research Special Interest Group (GUR-SIG), a special one-day event, to be held in parallel with GDC 2010 in San Francisco. Ben will be speaking about ways of conducting user research on games with children, alongside Carla C. E. Fisher of Cornell University. He will also discuss methods for conducting international game user research, drawing on practical experiences from recent research studies.

Ben said: ‘I’m very excited to be speaking at the summit. The very fact that this event has been organised shows how games user research is becoming more and more part of the development process, which can only be a good thing for gamers, and the industry as a whole.’

The summit takes place on Wednesday March 10, 2010. All seats for the event have been taken, but interested parties can find out more, and sign up for video recordings of the summit, by joining the Games User Research SIG on LinkedIn, or by contacting PlayableGames.

Infragistics, experts in user interface (UI) development tools and the User Experience (UX) market, has just launched Quince Pro, a private, secure and organized way to collaborate, communicate and cultivate private UX design libraries to ensure consistent user experiences across teams, departments and companies. Quince Pro is primarily targeted at UX experts, UI designers and interaction designers as a tool for them to formalize and better collaborate and communicate with implementation teams.

“Growing out of Quince, a free, interactive UI patterns and practices catalog, comes Quince Pro to enable developers, interactive designers and UX professionals to formalize and better collaborate and communicate with their implementation teams,” said Dean Guida, President and CEO at Infragistics. “As a leader in UI development tools for more than 20 years, we’ve heard over and over again that one of the biggest challenges in developing better user interfaces with consistent and engaging user experiences is to bridge the gap between the design team and development team. Quince Pro is the perfect tool for just that.”

In additional to online style guides, Quince Pro has many real-world usage scenarios including as:
- A Design pattern research tool to capture well-established best practices for user interface design solutions;
- An Application for collecting and sharing design ideas through the corkboard in Quince Pro that acts as a private workspace;
- A Design collaboration tool with a dedicated library allowing team members to collaborate on designs together during the design stage of a user interface project.

“Our team has been using Quince as a reference tool for the last year and had been thinking about creating a private design library of our own to help ensure our complex web application design remains usable and consistent,” said Jane Austin, Head of User Experience Design at IG Index located in London. “We were put off by our knowledge of how difficult pattern libraries can be to maintain and to share. This is why we were delighted when we discovered Quince Pro. It’s easy to use with an appealing interface which means it’ll be easier to get buy-in from others in our company we want to share the patterns with. Its real-time collaborative interface will also allow us to support our team, many of whom work remotely. We are really excited about the prospect of building our own pattern library using Quince Pro.”

This issue includes an invited essay by Daryle Gardner-Bonneau who provides us with her perspective on the increasing complexity of technology which is unfortunately not accompanies by increased usability.

In addition, this issue includes two peer-reviewed articles: one is on using eye movements data to reflect self-awareness in usability testing, and the second on the usability of random keypads as one of the possible ways to increase the usability of PIN-related interaction.

By Gerry McGovern


Customers are much more likely to get impatient with your website than they are to be bored with it.

When was the last time you were bored with a website? Do you get bored with Google? Do you get bored with Amazon? Perhaps the last book you bought from Amazon was boring, but was the Amazon website itself boring to use?

Do you get bored with Facebook or Twitter? You might get bored with your friends but it’s unlikely that you’ve been bored by the websites themselves. When Facebook announced that they were redesigning their website did everyone go: “Great! We’re so bored with the old one!”

Quite the opposite actually. “After a redesign in March, a Facebook poll revealed that 94 percent of users didn’t like the changes,” Caitlin McDevitt wrote for Slate in February 2010. “When Facebook introduced its News Feed in 2006, students organized to protest against it.”

The Facebook changes may have been the right thing to do. In the long-term, people may have found them very useful. However, people liked the old design because they were used to it. They didn’t want change. Often, the organization wants change much more than the customer.

Why do organizations want change? A number of reasons. To make more money. To improve the quality of the service or product. Because a new manager has been appointed and they need to make their mark. Because the marketing department is bored with the old design. Just bored. It’s a few years old and they’re sick of looking at it.

Redesigning is fun. You feel important. Agencies are great at making you feel that way. They show you way cool designs and you can bring all your intellectual and artistic skills to bear as you discuss way deep things like emotional appeal and branding. Be careful.

By Jamais Cascio


In 2008, the San Francisco-based user experience design firm Adaptive Path was asked to create some prototype designs of what the Firefox Web browser of the year 2020 might look like. Adaptive Path, in turn, asked me to help them think through what the Internet and the world of 2020 might look like, so that they would have a better sense of how a future Firefox might be used. This is exactly the kind of task that scenario work is well-suited for, so I suggested that rather than give them a single Vision of Tomorrow, I’d help them see a small set of alternatives. They agreed.

The three styles I used for these scenarios can be categorized as “Scenario-as-Story,” “Scenario-as-Recollection,” and “Scenario-as-History.” I brought together some folks from Adaptive Path and from my own network, and had a two-day brainstorming and scenario-design session. Three scenarios resulted from the workshop—that is, three overarching scenario concepts, supported by lots of bullet points and sticky notes, all in roughly chronological order, resulted. I then took these results and turned them into narrative scenarios. Adaptive Path used these narrative scenarios as inspiration and “future reality” checks for their own design scenarios, presented on video.

But in creating my three scenarios, I took an unusual turn: I decided that I’d write each of the three scenarios in a different scenario style. That made it harder to compare the three, but it meant that each would speak to audiences in differing ways, so that readers who found one style unpalatable might find another style much more to their liking.

By Craig Tomlin


In the world of usability, nothing seems to confuse my clients more than trying to determine exactly what a usability review is. And it’s difficult to purchase something if you don’t know what it is!

You can think about a usability review this way, it’s kind of the same as going to a doctor for a check-up, your web site will be examined to find usability issues (ailments) and you’ll be provided with recommended optimizations (prescriptions) for improvements. Usability reviews are not generally well known or understood because the usability field itself does not have a single, consistent, standardized definition of “usability review.” It’s an interesting and ironic truth that usability professionals who pride themselves on utilizing standards for testing and optimizing web sites can’t create their own set of standard definitions of common usability terms. Go figure.

So, what is a usability review and how do you do one?
Since there is no consistent standardized definition of a usability review (also known as an expert review, expert usability review, usability audit, heuristic evaluation, etc. etc. etc.) I’ll go ahead and give you mine:

“A usability review is an evaluation of a user interface versus common usability best practices and heuristics by a trained usability professional.”

So in the spirit of sharing and giving, here are the steps I use when conducting a review. By following these steps, you will have all the information necessary to conduct your own usability review.

Ovo Studios has released a new software product targeting user experience consultants and small usability teams. The package, called Ovo Solo, hit the shelves on February 15.

Ovo Solo is based on the same framework as the company’s flagship Ovo Logger Suite, and provides users the ability to set-up, administer, analyze and report on usability studies. The software will retail for $499 (US).
“We’ve had a lot of really positive feedback over the years from smaller usability teams on our Ovo Logger software solution, but because of budget constraints, a lot of them were unable to purchase it. We hope that this package will meet their needs both from a use standpoint as well as a budgetary perspective,” said Ovo Studios principal Scott Butler.

The software package is designed to capture a single screen and optional web camera video source, and allows users to log notes that will synch with that recorded video for post-study analysis and highlight creation. Researchers can take notes in real-time on a secondary machine connected via LAN, or after the study using Ovo Solo's Log From Saved Video feature.

Ovo Solo allows users to collect participant information including unlimited demographics, set up scenario materials along with task parameters such as sub-timers, counters and checklists, create surveys and questionnaires, create categories for pre-defined user behaviors and create an unlimited number of treatments for how to deploy the information. The software can ‘self-moderate’ the test, presenting task scenario materials to users via its Solo Player console. Upon completion of the test, Ovo Solo allows users to replay video and take notes, clean up data and generate an HTML report with automated analytics and charts such as mean time on task and success ratings, survey response metrics and category frequency. In addition, researchers can create highlight clips from their video files and combine them with titles, captions, voiceovers, and transitions in Ovo Solo's Highlight Reel Generator.

“We’ve made our name in the industry by providing powerful post-study analysis and we didn’t want to steer away from that. I think Ovo Solo customers will be pleasantly surprised by just how much they are getting when they buy this package,” said Butler.

These three crucial questions can shed light about how you and your team work to address issues of vision, feedback and culture. Spool says “teams that answer these questions well are far more likely to create great experiences than the rest of the pack.”

Question 1: What will the experience be like five years from now?
While we all work towards a goal, it’s imperative to make sure that everyone not only understands the goal, but is also able to articulate it in such a way that illustrates how the user will interact and complete the transaction. Looking ahead five years ensures that the actions go beyond the “immediate reactive requirements and starts considering what a great experience could be.”

Question 2: In the last six weeks, have your team members spent at least two hours watching people experience your product or service?
It goes without saying that if you’re focused on user experience, learning how people engage online requires observation. If you’re not watching, you can’t advance their experience. From usability tests or field studies, it’s necessary to spend at least two hours observing the current experience.

Question 3: In the last six weeks, have you celebrated the problems discovered in the user experience?
Spool believes that problems become opportunities for improvement. Establishing a culture that accepts failure, as well as appreciates it as a way to learn about the users and their needs, can learn best from their mistakes. Ultimately, by making the learning process explicit — offering rewards and acknowledgment for finding bugs — the culture starts to look for it.

People confused and frustrated by computers can now turn to a laptop called Alex built just for them. Based on Linux, the laptop comes with simplified e-mail, web browsing, image editing and office software.

Those who sign up for Alex pay £39.95 a month for telephone support, software updates and broadband access. Its creators hope the laptop and its simple suite of software proves to be a popular alternative to the Windows and Mac operating systems.

"Alex is not designed as a super-computer," said Barney Morrison-Lyons, head of technology at The Broadband Computer Company which is behind Alex. "We're not buying into the current computer market."

The idea behind Alex was to make using a computer a "simple and enjoyable" experience, said Andy Hudson, one of the founders of the company.

A new study suggests that some of the UK's online retailers are not taking the issue of accessibility seriously enough, with progress seeming to stall, according to a new study.

Last year, Webcredible's Accessibility Report gave the websites of 20 UK high street retailers an average score of 62%, but this year the score has slipped to 60%. So which retailers need to pay more attention to accessibility?

The biggest culprit in terms of poor accessibility was Currys, closely followed by Woolworths, which is no surprise since the site is also very poor in terms of usability. The report makes the point that the inclusion of Woolworths this year does bring the overall average down, though it would be worse still if sites like River Island's inaccessible Flash website were also included.

Currys scores particularly bady on a number of points, such as not making it easy for users to resize text so it is legible and not labelling headings as heading, all of which makes it difficult or impossible for customers with screen readers to use the site.

Other retailers scoring less than the average of 60% included Body Shop, Early Learning Centre and Mothercare.

A survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders reveals fascinating new perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered.

The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers. It is the fourth in a series of Internet expert studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The report covers experts' thoughts on the following issues:

•Will Google make us stupid?
•Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
•Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
•Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?
•Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?
“Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and rendering of knowledge,” said Janna Anderson, study co-author and director of the Imagining the Internet Center. “There are still many people, however, who are critics of the impact of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools.”

One to One Interactive Inc., a Boston-based digital marketing firm recently ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in America, announced today a definitive agreement to acquire fhios, with operations in the UK, Singapore, and Brazil.

The merger expands One to One Interactive's comprehensive suite of digital marketing products and services by incorporating fhio’s user experience, research, and design practice with OTOinsights and its patent-pending Neuromarketing research platform, Quantemo. The move represents the fifth time OTO has grown through a merger or acquisition, a strategy the company embarked on beginning in 2005. The addition of fhios provides OTO with expanded UK /European presence while adding new offices in Brazil and Singapore. fhios has run programs for clients such as Reuters, Motorola, Hilton, eBay, Dell and Philips in industries such as financial services, travel /tourism and media /publishing.

fhios specializes in customer experience strategy, research and design covering areas such as usability, eye tracking, concept testing, brand perception and competitive benchmarking to help answer key business issues to help its clients provide their customers with that all important stellar customer experience. The company has experience in both public and private sectors ranging from financial services to travel in both B2B and B2C markets.

"Our acquisition of fhios will help OTO achieve several of its 2010 strategic objectives. We are expanding our Web 3.0 /semantic customer experience research, design and strategic capabilities at a time when brands are transitioning significant marketing budget from traditional to digital," said Ian Karnell CEO of One to One Interactive. "Additionally, fhios' substantial international presence gives OTO access to new markets for all of its products and services."

"We are excited to become part of One to One Interactive," said Dr. Philip Rhodes, CEO of fhios who will be the SVP, Managing Director of OTOinsights. "We see this as an opportunity to bring our deep human experience expertise to new North American audience, add OTOinsights neuromarketing research capabilities to our client offerings, and to engage more deeply with our client's projects."

Foolproof has been selected as the preferred User Experience (UX) and Usability partner for Santander UK, following a formal vendor procurement process.

As experience design specialists with substantial knowledge of the financial sector, Foolproof brings a level of experience and expertise to the partnership unrivalled in the industry. As part of the selection process Foolproof has already delivered on two pilot projects, working with group members Abbey and Alliance and Leicester.

Foolproof Partner, Tim Loo, is heading up the partnership: “We are delighted to have been chosen as the preferred User Experience partner for Santander. They have ambitious plans for growing the importance of digital channels within their business and being selected by Santander cements our position as the leading UX agency in financial services.”

Adrian Homer, of the Online Delivery team at Santander, comments: “We are pleased to be working with Foolproof, as their experience will be key to supporting our goal of improving each online customer touch point to enhance our overall servicing capability and improve customer loyalty.”

Is your site usable? Testing the usability of a site is one of the first things to be done during the search engine optimisation process. Keeping tabs on usability is one of the ways to assess how much work your site is going to need to pull it up in the rankings. Every search engine optimisation company will have their own usability checklists, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about SEO analyses. It’s a good idea for every site owner to have their own, to be used as part of their ongoing SEO maintenance.

A basic usability test can be done in 10 seconds.

• Type in your site address. How long does it take to load? It’s a good idea to measure this on a stopwatch. Measuring with such precision may seem strange, but it’s necessary. If your pages take more than two or three seconds to load, your site’s users are likely to be put off, returning to the search engine results pages before they ever see your site. Page load needs to be measured from the point of clicking on the link to the point at which the page is fully viewable. This means images and video content as well. Sitting waiting for elements of a page to load can be more frustrating than waiting for the initial load.

• The next four seconds are spent analysing the information that’s immediately available on the page. Second 1: the user takes in the design elements to make a decision about the worth of your site. This happens swiftly and mostly subconsciously. Second 2: The next thing noticed is your content. If your page design is too busy, the user has to spend too much time trying to find the content, and it takes more than one second for them to assess it. This will affect their opinion of your site.

By Dan Matthews


Our Customers are being challenged by an ever more complex and demanding market and globalisation is the key driver of this change. It's far from a new phenomenon but the economic climate has catalysed the need for businesses to look beyond stagnant domestic markets and expand operations into emerging and growing economies. As a result, the way businesses operate is increasingly complex with offices in locations all over the world, a decentralised knowledge base, and global supply chains and dispersed virtual teams that must collaborate and work together irrespective of location.

As business gets more complex, the IT applications and systems that support it need to do the exact opposite - getting easier to use and helping simplify the process of collecting and using business information. Enterprise applications are hugely powerful and yet are only as good as the information that resides within them. This means that employees of all ages at all levels of the business need to be comfortable and confident in using them in order to maximise the benefits. User resistance can be a big contributor to IT project failure and a lot of this comes down to a poor user experience of dated, clunky user interfaces. In order to get people using business applications, you have to make interacting and engaging with them more satisfying.

Evolving expectations
In parallel to this growing business need, user expectations have irrevocably changed - having a direct impact on enterprise application development. This usability evolution can be attributed largely to the internet where any solution has to be so intuitive that it can be used without prior training or knowledge, and the phenomenal uptake of social and online media.

Users are now accustomed to the highly simplified but very powerful applications they encounter on the web and are wondering why their enterprise tools cannot look and feel the same way. Any interface they use must be familiar and comfortable, they expect it to be intuitive and if it falls short of their expectations, they will quickly lose patience.

After all, one of the key reasons for installing enterprise software is to simplify the running of business processes so that decision making can be improved. In order to better understand what users were looking for from Enterprise applications, last year we commissioned an international survey of more than 1000 business IT users looking specifically at usability.

By Jason Palmer


Hand-held devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm's material that exploits a quantum physics trick.

The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied. A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the "Quantum Tunnelling Composite". The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets.

In January, Japanese touch-screen maker Nissha also licensed the approach from Yorkshire-based Peratech, who make the composite material QTC. However, as part of the licensing agreements, Peratech could not reveal the phone, gaming, and device makers that could soon be using the technology to bring pressure sensitivity to a raft of new devices. Besides control for scrolling, the pressure-sensitivity could lead to a "third dimension" in touchscreens. For instance, instead of many "2-D" pages of applications, they could be grouped by type on a single page - using the press of a finger to dive into each type and select the desired app.

QUANTUM MACE
The composite works by using spiky conducting nanoparticles, similar to tiny medieval maces, dispersed evenly in a polymer. None of these spiky balls actually touch, but the closer they get to each other, the more likely they are to undergo a quantum physics phenomenon known as tunnelling. Tunnelling is one of several effects in quantum mechanics that defies explanation in terms of the "classical" physics that preceded it. Simply put, quantum mechanics says that there is a tiny probability that a particle shot at a wall will pass through it in an effect known as tunnelling.

Similarly, the material that surrounds the spiky balls acts like a wall to electric current. But as the balls draw closer together, when squashed or deformed by a finger's pressure, the probability of a charge tunnelling through increases. The net result is that pressing harder on the material leads to a smooth increase in the current through it.