Workstations and touch .. bring on the new heuristics

a blog post at 37 Signals talked about touch screens creating an opportunity or new set of solutions for the 'hover'...

I'm looking forward to see what the new gesture set or interface change for hover is.. hopefully that will unfold as people go back to what the original purpose/context of the 'hover' was for and abstract it out again in these new domains.

What did strike my interest was the premise the post had regarding adaptability of 'power users' to touch domains'

"all with tiny movements of the fingers. For those of us who work all day on computers, touch interfaces are not an impending disruption."

How interaction designers work within what may become new ergonomic heuristics of ensuring long term comfort and safety at a workstation (or place sustained work activity is carried out on an interface) will be critical . Where you look and where you interact may be one and the same. Ensuring larger gestures are still safe and sustainable replacing that only the 'tiny finger movements' used to do present an intriguing design boundary.

Where your at a work station hopefully the 'arm' is at rest & wrists are supported for long periods whilst your working.

Small movements along the same horizontal plane to get to the mouse and back minimize grosser (larger) motor movements across the shoulder and neck (I'm not up with physiology so forgive me for any generalizations) .

Where the eye looks and the positioning of limbs and range of motions for corresponding gesture are all now in play. We'll be all either really buff or making physiotherapists and worker compensation administrators very happy.

Check out

Designing for Humans blog posts tagged for anthropometric data

Schematics post on touch screen ergonomics

Webstock - Post thoughts

Webstock was as usual, great..

Key messages

• Location based and context aware experiences are going to be more and more prevalent
• Test with users
• Test early and often
• Design with emotion of the experience in mind
• Usability is only one component of the user experience

It was great to catchup with peers from different disciplines and see some Australians come to Webstock this year. SPread the word guys and hopefully NZ will reciprocate sending people over to UX Australia this year.

http://bemorehuman.org/ - I'm quoting here because I'm lazy "
Silverstripe had a booth where "each conference attendee was given a card that asked the question: "How do humans win?" The attendees filled out the card with their answers and placed it on the wall according to where they thought their answer fit on the grid. Is it serious or funny? Is it complex or simple?"

"Friday afternoon, Webstock speakers Mark Pesce and John Resig each chose an attendee's response as their favourite answer. Our congratulations to the winners!

• Peter Grierson: By synthesizing experiences (and making mistakes) into something new & keeping emotion in the equation."

Thanks Silverstripe, Mark and John for selecting my offering.

ASB Fastnet. It's the little things or Don't make me think!

Over lunch (like a good employee) I did my internet banking...and also then wrote this post..perhaps a tad soapboxy but ...

Bank statements. We love to look at them, export them, ponder them and see what our money is doing or what ...

ASB Bank in New Zealand recently redid their look and feel of their Internet Banking offering "Fastnet".

It looks great, nice and clean (see illustration), but in the clean up they swept out one simple drop list out of the statement generator.

In one 'sweep', it changes how people look for statements in a particular range.. now its a chore, a mild one granted.

Previously, selecting statements of a particular range could be done with date pickers or via a drop down list of ranges (e.g. 3, 6 months back). It was quick and easy and took seconds to get an export. It corresponded to natural language. (e.g. "I want my statements for the last 3 months")

Now, people have to use calender pickers or type the range in (see the illustration above) only. It sounds trivial ("there goes the usability guy again") but why is it grinding my gears?

Right now, think about how you talk - "I want three months of statements or perhaps you are more exacting "I want statements from November 09 to August 09", but lets assume day to day you just want to look at past statements.

Using the calender picker only means: I have to think about this and fiddle more with my mouse or keyboard. Lets face it, people are lazy, impatient and want things fast. Here, they're made to type and think more about a date ranges.

Take 1 - the old way

Goal -I want my last six months of statements

Method

• I click on the drop down, select "last 6 months", export to CSV..

Done!

Take 2 - the new way

Same goal - I want my statements 6 months back.

Method + stream of consciousness

• (Starts counting on fingers) "So that's today

• and I want them back to the 3rd of......... er Nov, Oct, (whats before August) er September, (pauses whilst counting six months of the year backwards ..try it yourself. )

or

• I'm clicking the month picker 6 times..("bo -ring! I just want my statement" - picturing a teen with no attention span or an older user)

Continuing (and just noticing with the reviewer hat on..)

• "Number of transactions per page ?" *pause* "my export is going to have pages? Do I choose a value? Leave it ? er I'll ignore it and hope for the best"..
• Export and done...
  

Not that I want to do an 'American Airlines', but here's a take on making this simpler for every day use. All due apologies to designers and the like .. this was just done in axure pro as I wanted to turn around this fast within my lunch hour.

Iteration 1

A 'Range' picker makes it faster for me to generate a statement using natural language for selections.


Fastnet has rules for the data you can have when either Exporting or Viewing data. The instructions telling you this are lower down the screen. However its not an area people look at often if their focus is on this form/control.

Why make me work the rules out? Or ping me with an error if I get it wrong?



Iteration 2 - again quickly

• Let's have instructions relevant to the selection type, when & where I need them (e.g. at the point they are relevant and where I'm looking). Have the relevant text appear for 'View' or 'Export' selections.
• Constrain the date ranges and drop downs to the data available depending on the amount we're allowed in each circumstance.

• Since 'Transactions per page' is only relevant to a 'view' and export format relevant to export, have them appear depending on the selection above too..

Hopefully this doesn't get any ones back up :) It still looks clean, but some aesthetes may take exception and want instructions and prompts that help people through forms out of the way. Sure its 'clean', but it takes away relevancy and speed. Is it art or banking?

Is it me or am I chronologically challenged

That date picker also got me, I thought "from" meant "now" the current day to the date range back (to)..

This could also be just me - I think historically in terms of statements. 'From'' is today and 'to' is how far back I want my statements. I think from the present (from) to the future (to) when thinking about booking tickets, flights etc). User research (see my health check post) can find out how people view your world.

Wrapping up..

This might be trivial, nit picky, but it does make a potential difference to usage and speed.

If you are designing or refreshing the look and feel, get an external/or internal resource to conduct a usability review of your site to catch gotchas or "if it ain't broke, don't fix its".

Steve Krug where art thou? Luke W?

Goldstein?

Near end of year resolutions?

I've still got to write about UX week. In the mean time, its almost the end of the year and if you are thinking about new years resolutions why not take have your website in for a check up next year. You get your car and own health hopefully regularly maintained, but do you know how healthy your website is?

A website heath check is a quick and inexpensive way to evaluate website effectiveness in terms of:

• Fulfilling your business goals
• Search engine visibility
• Customer/website visitor fulfillment
• Ease of use and 'findability' of key content
  
• Compliance with best practice usability measures

Add ons include recruiting representatives from your target market to round out the check up to a full indepth check and discover:

• How well is your site working for people - By conducting usability testing with participants key tasks and goals
• Got burning questions from marketing and product managers about a particular direction you're going in? Allocate time for a qualitative research interview -to test some ideas with a snapshot of your target market.
  

Commissioning a full website health check will produces richer findings, and give you valuable insights into the health of your website and direction for any redesign exercise.

A great DIY healthcheck site can be found at www.uxhealthcheck.com or you can look at the directory in www.upassoc.org for a practitioner in your area to help you out.

UPA consultants directory
UX alliance
DIY resources from Infodesign Australia

Note: I don't endorse nor get any incentives for listing these folks. I know many of them but presenting these links as illustrative only. I accept no liability for any loss or damage etc etc, my lawyer can beat up your lawyer.

Agencies - design for your market, not your designers. or Promotions need UCD love too

• We don't have time
• It makes sense to me
• The designer just did it with the project manager giving them the brief from the client
• The client likes it

Digital agencies promise the client a quick fast results - and often skip validation and to known interaction design or usability standards in lieu of quick, attractive results.

That's fine when your designer is working for an audience just like them, as they will make something people like them will use. The client, either not tech savvy or unaware will not question the usefulness or effectiveness of the design, often just signing off on the nice looking end result in an office on a projector. They are often too scared of sounding ignorant or have no awareness of usability and interaction design accepting that it looks great, trusting the agency.

Sanitarium trusted an agency to do a promotion for Kids and had to go back to the drawing board on a recent internet promotion as it was too hard to use (see article).

Conducting quick usability testing with the target market: Kids, would have intercepted this issue, stopped the bad publicity, and made a fun, usable promotion that still would have been on brand and attractive. Given the negative attention this caused Sanitarium, is usability testing and user centered design an overhead now? Part of that 1.3 million dollar campaign budget could have and should have gone into a few extra hours of review and validation.

Budget and time are the most common excuses that agencies have to skip user centered design steps or usability activities.

Usability testing, as the usability practitioner in the article link recommends, is vital. However by this stage, the design is in a form that stakeholders and designer may be attached to, which politically makes it very hard to change.

Good usability and interaction design should also be built in at the formative stages of a promotion or design. Usability testing then works as insurance validating the design.

Agencies can still deliver fast and effectively and still do usability activities quickly: here are a few tips:

• Profile the target markets cababilities (kids are a classic case: different motor and cognitive skills than an adult let alone a designer)
• Work within usabilty and interaction design standards (e.g. if a model or metaphor isn't broken don't fix it). These don't stifle the creativity of 'designers' no matter what they say
• Conduct initial sketches or just review a working version with a user centered design practitioner. Walkthroughs that pick up issues can be done easily by sitting down with the designer and changing things on the spot. (either at the whiteboard or at the screen)
• Train and educate visual designers in interaction and usability design principles (A good effective design can be true to their 'vision' still)
• Test with your target market as the quoted usability practioner recommends in the article link (especially your audience is very different from the people who build your promotions).

Time and time again digital agencies see usability and user centered design as an overhead, too formal and scale back investment in user centered design in times of economic downturn. Gems like this prove that UCD has a place even in fast paced agencies and leaving things to rock star visual designers who know flash and other web design tools is a big risk. 'agencies' and clients alike take note (and stipulate that the site/promo be validated with your market).

Intranets - way back post

What a nice surprise to find the outline of a presentation I did on usable intranets (link) I did a while back still online. Thanks Micheal Sampson

household harmony - an 'everyday things' post

well my harmony universal remote passed the ultimate house guest usability test. I had a house guest who had previously professed to be a technophobe. He couldn't drive the 3 remote controls needed to watch TV (amp set to TV, set top box and TV set to AV) without help.

This visit, he arrived home before me and when he walked into the lounge, he noticed the remote lighting up on the arm of the couch (good experience - 'hey here I am')

He picked it up to see on the screen 'what would you like to do?' with 'Watch TV' being one of the 4 options on the screen.

He pressed the corresponding button next to 'Watch TV' and it told him to keep pointing the remote at the TV.

Outcome: he was able to walk in, press one button and get started immediately. No Struggle, no feeling helpless...

If that's not a testament to the good experience to be had through activity/outcome driven design, I don't know what is. The remote matched the goal in my Friends mind when it used the language of the outcome he was seeking, not the function(s) it had.

it reminds me of Alan Coopers thoughts on polite, helpful software in 'The inmates are running the asylum'. Reminding us to capture/analyse context and outcomes to be built in to instructional and interaction design.