UsabilityNews

By Gemma Birch


Shari Thurow, founder and SEO Director of Omni Marketing Interactive, answers a few questions about search and international usability.

- If you could give just one tip to search marketers working on global campaigns, what would it be?

My one search marketing tip is actually a website usability tip: use your users’ language, and use it well. British English is very different from (US ) American English and Australian English. Parisian French is very different from Canadian French. Spanish in Spain is different from Mexican and Argentinean Spanish. The grammar is different. The slang is different. Word nuances are different. It is so very important to use your users’ language.

- You’ll be speaking about the scent of information at the International Search Summit - what exactly does that mean?

On a website the scent of information consists of textual and graphical cues that communicate:
(1) Where am I?
(2) Where can I go?
(3) How can I get there?
(4) Should i click on this link?

When the scent of information is strong and reinforces user mental models, people click. When the scent of information is diminished or lost, people leave your website.

- And what is the impact of this on international websites - do scents differ between countries?

Absolutely! Words have different meanings in different languages. And colours have different meanings in different languages. Therefore, if words and images communicate different meanings in different countries, then the scent of information differs between countries.

- During all of your research, what is the most interesting or surprising fact you have discovered about international usability?

Credibility is an important facet of user experience. I am continually surprised at how people in different countries determine a website’s, and a company’s, credibility. In the United States, there is a directness that is expected and acceptable. In other countries, that directness is unexpected and often perceived as rude, even though it is never our intention to be rude. Therefore, placement of the About US, News and Testimonials and Case Studies on a site is different in different countries.

By Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera


Earlier this month, Spanish authorities and security researchers worked together to track down and capture three Spanish men behind the Mariposa botnet, a network of almost 13 million computers across 190 countries.

The breaches discovered were far-reaching. The botnet compromised systems across several Fortune 1000 companies and 40 financial institutions. At the time of his arrest, one of the botnet operators possessed sensitive information about approximately 800,000 victims.

The three men, authorities said, were no computer geniuses.

"These people didn't have any advanced hacker skills," said Sean-Paul Correll, researcher at Panda Security, one of the firms involved in the investigations. "They just had resources available to them online and were able to take advantage of them to build this network."

Once the exclusive realm of highly technical geeks, the doors to the dark world of cybercrime have cracked wide open to individuals with basic computer skills thanks to easy-to-use software that experts say have become widely available in the last three or four years and made hacking as simple as clicking on a checkbox.

Almost anyone can operate a botnet through simple commands on self-explanatory, Web-based programs. As a result, the number of amateur botmasters is on the rise.

At "The UX of Mobile" discussion at South by Southwest Interactive, four panelists offered advice on designing and launching products for mobile devices.

Kyle Outlaw, who designs iPhone apps and mobile sites at Razorfish, noted that many of his clients end up creating a mobile strategy as they pursue their first mobile product. Many news organizations are in the same situation: They know they need to get into mobile, but aren't sure why or how until they begin.

These tips can help you strategize what to do on mobile and could help you create a product that works better for users.

Don't overlook the mobile Web in pursuit of iPhone apps. "Long-term, I'm a strong believer that the Web will be bigger than apps," said Google's Scott Jenson, whose experience in user interface design goes back to the Apple Newton.

If you want to create something exciting, build a native app, he said. But if you want to do something quick -- and everyone seems to need something quick -- pursue a mobile app. Dave Stanton, Poynter's technology fellow, advocated recently that news orgs should consider mobile apps, which can perform many of the same functions as native apps and can be much easier to build. Jenson's comments support that approach.

You must get feedback from real users before you launch your product. "Go hand it to someone who doesn't like you very much and isn't a tech expert and say, 'Use it, please,' " said Barbara Ballard of Little Springs Design.

When clients take her firm's advice to spend money on usability research, "we always find something to fix." Even testing among a few people helps.

Useful presentation on the relationship between website usability and conversion.

By Tom Stewart
Joint Managing Director, System Concepts


Children represent a huge market for digital products yet most are designed by and for adults. Even those which are targeted at children often get it embarrassingly wrong – like dads trying to be ‘cool’. But all is not lost. We have found that user research and testing with children opens up a whole new perspective, helping adult designers to see the world through the eyes of a child.

Our user research with children has ranged from social networking and mobile phones to online games and websites targeted at everyone from toddlers to teens. Here we share some of the lessons we have learnt in adapting our usability research and testing methods for children...

THE TESTING ENVIRONMENT
Have a close look at the environment you are using for the testing. Is it friendly and welcoming to children or is it a bit cold and clinical with lots of distractions? Removing distractions and adding a bit of comfort and colour can make a big difference to results.

When testing with younger children it is important to have a parent or familiar adult around to provide reassurance. The adult may or may not participate directly in the session depending on what we are trying to achieve and what sort of feedback we need.

If a parent would normally help their child use a website, then it can be helpful to observe when they step in to help. They can also help with answering questions and comment on how the children usually work at home.

To get a true understanding of childrens' behaviour we also find it very valuable to interview children and their parents at home, and to observe them at school. This allows us to see how they behave in their normal environment, without the distractions and unfamiliarity of a testing lab.

“Old-school usability espouses the idea that user activities are onerous tasks that they want to get out of the way as soon as possible. While this is true in some cases, usability is now widely understood to be more of a hygiene factor–something that can cause dissatisfaction if missing, but its presence cannot take you beyond lack of dissatisfaction.” – Harry Brignull

There’s a good business case for making your website more accessible to the UK’s disabled community.

If your website is at the design stage then ask your designer what they’re doing to ensure that people with sight difficulties and cognitive impairments can still use your pages. It’s undeniably easier to build accessibility in from the start. Don’t despair if your website is already up and running, though, you can still retrofit.

BOOST YOUR CLIENT BASE
It’s not just best practice or ethical to ensure your pages are accessible, it has the potential to make a real difference to your customer base. According to the Employers’ Forum in Disability – a global collection of employers dedicated to helping firms recruit and retain staff members with disabilities – just over 10% of people in the UK have some form of disability. The disabled community also packs a powerful spending punch. According to the forum, they have an estimated £80 billion-worth of spending power in the UK and 71% of UK disabled people use the web to find information on potential purchases.

Of course, needs will vary quite dramatically, but the point is that a sizeable minority of the population have additional requirements when browsing your site. So, if your pages comply with best practice, you’re going to add to your potential client base. Not only that, if your competitors are failing to make their websites accessible, you could be winning their clients.

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.