Sexy vs. Usable

Whenever I get stumped on a UI, I ask is it a design issue or am I just being stupid? And as I have publicly pointed out in this blog, sometimes I'm just stupid. Got stumped on this one for awhile this morning:


BTW, very pretty dialog box. But the install button was disabled and I couldn't figure out why. Thought something might still be loading in the background so I waited. Finally figured out it was waiting on me...to accept the terms of the license agreement.

I don't think I was stupid on this one. I wasn't seeing the gray box to accept the terms, nor did its label catch my attention alerting me I had an action to complete.

If I could redesign this, I would make the check box white (nothing says empty as well as white) and I'd add a tad of space between the box/label and the paragraph above it.

And I mean it, it is a pretty dialog box, and I should know, I stared at it for thirty seconds.

User Adoption: A War with Two Fronts

I know, I ride Rogers' old horse beyond its intended range, but it just stays a useful model for a lot of what I do.

We can identify a point in an acceptance life-cycle with a vertical bar perpendicular to the x axis and somewhere along it. Then essentially we can say that we've got the population to the left of that line on board, and the ones to the right are the resistors we are still trying to win over. So the traditional model in my mind has been "resistance lines up on the right."

But I'm becoming increasingly aware of a negative image to that model, where resistance lines up on the left. Innovators and early adopters will resist efforts to lower the entry threshhold to a technology, preferring to keep the club exclusive. "We had to learn it the hard way, so should they." Or "If you make it too easy, then anyone will be able to [do my job][look as smart as me]."

There are so many examples that I am embarrassed it took me this long to notice it to where I could articulate it. Linux/Unix "We don't need no stinkin' GUI" VCR vs. film, digital camera vs. film, sites like this one vs. hard coding HTML.

This means any user adoption campaign is essentially a war waged on two fronts: Trying to entice the later adopters to come on board while battling resistance from the early adopters to anything that makes it easy for them.

I suspect this problem is most pronounced in non-profit and governmental organizations that are not as driven by the economics of user adoption as commercial enterprises are. I also suspect it is higher in technology communities. No data, just hunches.

Sounds like a good conversation for over beers after your next professional association meeting. Do me a favor and save the napkins for me.

New Menu Idea

Just helped a coworker figure out how to reopen his style and formatting palette in Word. He had shut it down because it was getting in his way, and then he needed it back.

That happens to me a lot. It's gotten to the point that I am so reluctant to turn anything off because I'm afraid I'll never figure out how to reactivate it. Well, every problem is the seed for an innovation!



Hey, I want credit if Microsoft uses this!

Yes, Virginia, there are stupid users.

I just didn't think my wife was sounding diligent enough about looking out for the UPS delivery guy, so I decided to work from home this afternoon so I knew someone would be here to accept delivery of the new guitar.

As I was working in my loft, I periodically checked the UPS tracking site to see if the status changed to indicate it had actually been dispatched. The current status message was a bit vague.

I hit refresh (for the 30th time in 30 minutes) and sure enough the status changed--to Delivered!! That got me a bit anxious, as in "TO WHOM--NOT ME!!!" It said "Garage."

I panicked. They delivered my Mike Auldridge guitar to a garage!!! Then I wondered something, so I went downstairs and opened the door to my garage.

What do you know. A guitar. So much for Mr. Eagle Eye.

I am like so old school

You might remember a blog I did last year about how not to update your look and feel. Essentially it says not to let old people (moi) design anything you want to appeal to the up and coming set of users.

I navigated to one of my old familiar sites and it has gone through a revamping by someone who certainly took my advice:


If you are over 60 (doh! moi again) give yourself about 5 minutes to figure out where to log in. Yes I know it says in BIG letters LOGIN and has a BIGASS button that says LOG IN.

It also has smudges for input fields.

I'm not complaining, "Brave new world that has such creatures in it" and all-- just saying I'm feeling like I'm a kazillion years old.

Maybe it needs a Help file that says "Type your password in the Password smudge." That would help geezers like me.

Mother and baby doing fine

I feel like I'm sending out a birth notice. This afternoon, Mike Auldridge inspected the latest batch of his MA-6 resophonic guitars (his signature guitar made by Paul Beard Guitars). I'm buying one directly through Mike. After checking them out (he still personally inspects all of his signature guitars) I'm told he said, "This one sounds just like mine," and then he set it aside for me.

Wow!

UPS says it will be here Thursday. Someone's not sleeping for the next couple of nights.

Put Personas to Work

Read my column this month in UXmatters; Personas as User Assistance and Navigation.

Requirements vs. Constraints

I love "x" graphs, you know, the ones that show one domain diminishing while another is increasing. They form an x, and the point of intersection represents a sweet spot or break-even point. These days, I feel like I'm living the one shown below:

The more feature-rich a particular design approach is, the more it delights product management. Of course, that starts to overload available engineering resources which drives their delight down. Being a UX designer puts one in this position a lot. On the one hand, you want the product or service to be a differentiator in the market place, one that carries a lot of delight to the customer. On the other hand, it has to be build-able within the constraints of the organization's resources.

So you look for that acceptable area of compromise, somewhere close to the intersection of the two lines. Something achievable that represents enough delight to be a package you can take to market. You end up playing devil's advocate at times, pushing back on product management and goading engineering to stretch. You need to be sensitive to when to back off and say, "OK, I hear you, let me see how I can make the design accommodate that."

In the end, you have to have both sides at the table at the same time, otherwise you find yourself in a series of no-win situations where you are the bearer of the bad news (the areas shown in gray). It also helps the spirit of compromise if each side can be connected to the other's point of pain. Engineering is more willing to bend when they deal with Product Management directly, and Product Management is more willing to compromise when Engineering says "Our schema can't accommodate that kind of a query." Also, each side can hammer out alternatives a lot more efficiently when talking to one another. I'm always impressed how creative engineers can be if you share the problem with them instead of insisting on a particular solution.

This could be one of the most important skill sets a UX designer develops, the arbiter of user requirements and product constraints.

Thanks to TTU

I spent last Thursday immersed with the students and faculty of Texas Tech's online Technical Communication and Rhetoric (TCR) PhD program. Actually, it all started on Wednesday evening with a delightful dinner at Dr. Tommy Barker's home. Tommy is head of STC's Academic SIG and Director of Technical Communication at TTU. Texas-style, nothing was done small or half way. Tommy had even procured a Dobro for me to use so we could do some bluegrass/rock-a-billy picking after dinner. Tommy played a mean acustic guitar and fellow faculty member Ken Baake joined us on banjo. For those in need of a scary thought to haunt you through the day, I have two words: PhDs yodeling.

Thursday morning I listened to doctoral students talk about their research projects, and I gave a keynote talk during lunch on the role of PhDs as practitioners. I spent the afternoon with Dr. Joyce Locke Carter, the Director of Graduate Studies in TCR, sitting in her usability class and touring their usability and multimedia facilities. That evening the students invited me to a barbecue.

I feel like I have seen the future of technical communication, and we are in good hands. The students were engaged in exciting research projects and projected more energy than I have encountered in a long time. The quality of the program is impressive, from the faculty--which reads like a list of academic Who's Who in technical communication--to the caliber of the graduate students (the TCR program accepts only 20% of its applicants).

The students work online most of the year, but spend two weeks working through an intensive "boot-camp" style program every summer. What I find most impressive about the program is the community of scholars this is developing for our field. TTU has worked out an effective formula for combining distance learning with face-to-face networking. And because these students have become accustomed to collaborating online, they will stay connected and influencing each other for the rest of their careers.

Congratulations to TTU for an excellent program, and thanks for the hospitality. That, and a hearty i-e-o-d-lady-hoo.

Robert's Rules of Order: Essential for UX?

I'm always amazed when information acquired in one context emerges to be useful in an entirely different environment. As a member of the STC Board of Directors, and its current president, I've had to learn a lot about Robert's Rules of Order. I even have my own dog-eared version that I referred to a lot during some tricky proceedings this past year. One would think, what could be more esoteric and useless in the real world of user experience design than parliamentary law? It's not like we aply that kind of formality in our Agile scrum meetings every morning.

"I move we develop a regex to capture the time stamp field."
"I second that."
"Discussion?"

So I'm working these days on trying to design a report format around a particular data security standard. I've spent a lot of time trying to understand the standard and what it requires of users and what it would require of our product. I suddenly realized that my analysis was feeling like the kind of research I did on Robert's Rules. I don't think I could have critically analyzed the standard nearly as effectively had I not had the experience of trying to critically understand Robert's Rules so I could use them effectively to move my agenda forward.

I'm used to getting a lot of value from my involvement as a volunteer with STC; even so, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the legal-like research I had done on parliamentary law paid off in developing skills later useful for researching a data security standard for a technical communication project. It's taught me to be more mindful of what I can take while in the act of giving. And hey, there's nothing wrong with that. The more we let ourselves benefit from volunteering, the more willing we are to volunteer.

Mantra for today: Do good; get smarter.

Happy Monday

Thanks to [unnamed product]'s registration site for giving me the ability to leap through the torn fabric of time and space.


Either that, or their UI developer slept during the lecture on Boolean logic. Or they think I'm quite large.

Also, check out my new motivational poster at http://cheezburger.com/View/3534870016

Recalculating

We have a Scrum Master (someone who manages an Agile team) who has nerves of steel. No matter what goes wrong, he just recalculates the new path to the solution from the new location.

My hard drive crashed last week in Houston and the Gibson Original Acoustic Instruments factory in Nashville got flooded. They were to ship my new Dobro guitar to me in two weeks.

So there I am in the Sheraton business center trying to recalculate my life. I had once lusted for the Mike Aldridge signature guitar from master luthier Paul Beard's shop. Too pricey at the time. But maybe the Nashville flood was an act of God--literally. After all, I first got interested in Dobro almost 40 years ago when I heard Mike on the radio. I bought his album, Mike Aldridge--Dobro, and I still have it. My wife reminded me the other day that I've had that album longer than I have known her.

So I went to Mike's web site and it listed a number to call to order directly. Well, by direct they meant like Mike Aldridge answers the phone. I was dumbstruck and stuttered and stumbled through something like "OMG, you're my hero, etc." Happy ending, I order new guitar from Mike who will pick it out himself from the batch that will be done last week in June. (Sweetheart of a wife is financing the difference between this one and the other.)



So that part's handled. Now, I just have to restore everything I lost on my hard drive. From here on out, I'm doing everything in the cloud. Kinda goes along with the whole act of God thing.

I have come down from the mountain

I've been very quiet the last several weeks as I have been wrestling with a long-standing inner conflict of mine. I have scoured my soul and I now know my mind. I am ready to make my public statement about...

[ominous fan fare in background]

ending a parenthetical statement with the smiley face icon.

Often, I want to soften a strong statement or add some context to a comment by putting a self-deprecating or explanatory comment with terminal smiley face in parentheses at the end of the sentence (as if my sentences aren't long enough :-))

See!!! See the problem? Is that Mike smiling inside parentheses or is it Mike with a double chin?

I sometimes solve it by using an em dash instead of the parentheses--in this case a double hyphen, but that sometimes offsets the contextualizing comment too much :-)

So I've decided to let the smiley face icon serve as both a smile and a closing parenthesis (thus saving ink in these oh must be so green days :-)

At any rate, problem solved for me.

BTW, went to the Atlanta STC Currents conference this weekend. Wow, I like my chapter.

Afternoon in the Garden of Good and Evil

This week I visited with a ladies' book club in Pine Mountain, Georgia, to discuss my novel, Iron Hoop. It was a classic Southern experience right out of "Midnight in the Garden..." The group were well-to-do retirees who lived in a very upscale neighborhood situated on Piedmont lake. Well dressed, genteel, and with Southern accents that flowed as sweetly and lazily as praline.

Needless to say, they all liked the character Grandmother Tillman--all being grandmothers themselves--and envied the relationship she has in the book with her grandson. The general conclusion was that they needed to tote guns as she did so they would be remembered for being more than just someone who said, "wash you hands" all the time.

The book deals with racism, and we had some interesting discussions about that common aspect of our Southern heritage.

And as many people are, they were interested in the process of creative writing. "Where did you get your ideas?"

It was a marvelous afternoon, sipping wine, having a light dinner, and being the center of attention in a room of gracious Southern ladies.

It's good to be a writer.

Analysis of a Diagram

Just because you like something you created, it doesn't mean:

• It's any good
• You have a big ego

But it can be useful to stop and ponder something you did that you particularly like--so that you can understand your own design priorities a bit better.

I recently created a diagram for an article in UXmatters that I liked:



The article was about the differences in the roles of User Interface (UI) developer and User Experience (UX) designer. I wanted a diagram that showed that each had distinct areas of expertise and that there were areas of overlap as well. Duh, Venn diagram, that's the easy part. My normal instinct would have been to abstract the areas and give them awful nominalizations probably. I decided to use concrete examples instead and to leave the abstraction to the reader. In the article I said:

The area that tends to fall under the exclusive domain of UI development includes the programming skills and knowledge. If you had a pin labeled Ruby on Rails, the UI development role would be a good place to stick it. The area that tends to be the exclusive domain of User Experience relates to user research and usability testing. Thus, if you had a pin labeled card sorting, the UX side of the diagram would be its predictable home. The area of shared expertise between the two roles includes knowledge of UI patterns and standards—the widgets and elements that make up a user interface—as well as knowledge about the software development process.

I like the simplicity of the diagram and for some reason, I especially like the stick pins. I'm reminded of a story about the famous educator John Dewey. He was visiting a classroom once as a superintendent, and the teacher asked the class, "What is the center of the earth composed of?" The students eagerly raised their hands and the teacher called on one. "Igneous rock," came back the answer. Dewey then interrupted and asked, "If I could reach my hand all the way to the center of the earth, what would happen to it?" No one could answer.

My "If you could put a stick pin labeled..." approach seems to have the level of concrete understanding that Dewey was looking for. I like that a complex classification has been explained in terms of a physically familiar task such as putting stickpins on a board.

Doesn't mean it's good.
Doesn't mean I'm being egotistical to say I like it :-)

Regression Testing for Usability

I just had a bad user experience at my bank's ATM. I'm not blogging to whine, they're a good bank, but I want to understand what went wrong with the experience and more importantly, the design process that led to it.

I drive up to the ATM and insert my card. New screen, bright and shiny oooooooh.

First new thing, it tells me to cover the keypad as I enter my PIN. Hmmmm, Not sure how one does that while sitting in a car, so I pointed to the sky and yelled, "Hey look, it's the Goodyear blimp" hoping to distract any lurker who might be there to steal my PIN.

OK, I got my PIN entered and the next screen asked me what I wanted, and I pressed "Get cash."

Then something happened that's never happened before, it gave me a list of accounts to select from. One said "Savings-123456," another "Visa Platinum-7654321," and then one said "CRWN-987654."

Nothing said "Checking." I figured the 1st one was my savings account and thought the second one was probably my credit card. That left me concluding that CRWN-987654 was my checking. We're talking money here and all of a sudden my ATM is giving me practice questions for the SAT. If all men eat turnips and John is a man, does John eat turnips?

So to be on the safe side, I decide to check the numbers on my card to see if they match 987654. Oops, card is in ATM. Cancel transaction to read numbers off card. Ooops, numbers no longer displayed on screen because I canceled transaction.

I'm in the business so I know what happened here. Product management decided to make my membership more valuable by now allowing me to select from multiple accounts when I withdraw cash. That's a good thing. But in doing so, the product has disrupted my familiar experience--turning a satisfier into a dis-satisfier.

When I was at CheckFree, whenever we introduced an enchancement to our online bill pay, we did what I called Usability Regression Testing. In QA, regression testing is when you make sure that a new feature doesn't break existing functionality. I think you have to do the same thing with usability, make sure that new features do not disrupt the comfort and familiarity of the user's current user experience.

Had they tested it they would have seen the whole number on the card in the ATM vs number on the screen thing.

They would have also figured out that CRWN did not mean "checking" to me. By the way, I checked it out with my wife, and apparently that's the marketing name for our service "Crown Checking." Marketing people are bad about that, they assume we are all in love with their product names and therefore familiar with them. Also, it was a huge screen with only 3 accounts, they could have said "Crown checking account" and I would have been OK.

Designers beware. When we improve the feature set, we run the risk of breaking a comfortable user experience. A little regression testing is always good.

Incremental-decremental (excremental)

I just changed cable providers, and this one has the same UI problem as the last. In both cases, if you view the guide (program menu), the channels start at the top of the screen and are listed in incremental order. That is:
001
002
003
...
So if you want to see the next channel after you reach the bottom of the screen, you press the down arrow key. This means you are pressing a DOWN command to go UP in number. For example, to go from seeing channel 7 to channel 8, I press DOWN. No problem, really, because the screen scrolls in the direction I indicate.

But if I am actually watching channel 7 and I want to go to channel 8, I press UP. Of course, I habitually press the DOWN button because my frame of reference is the menu screen.

There is a simple solution: They could list programs on the menu screen starting with the top channels and then decrementing. That way DOWN means DOWN no matter what.

But then you start with the specialty and premium channels on the menu and the not the common choices.

Excrement!

The point is that UI design is snarly stuff and not only must you accommodate user models and technical limitations, but sometimes business rules and market objectives as well.

Squirrel!

Dug, you gotta love him! But I seem to get involved in discussion threads where it seems a cyber squirrel runs through the conversation and everyone gets distracted. It's a good thing we didn't have discussion groups in the old days.

Churchill: Things are looking rough on the continent, the axis forces are massing to eliminate free civilization as we know it. This could be our darkest hour.
Roosevelt: Wow speaking of dark, the power went out last night and Elinor and I had to scramble for candles.
DeGaulle: I hate that, you never know where you put them.
Churchill: But the Nazis and the Fascists!
Roosevelt: Let them get their own candles.
DeGaulle: We can't provide candles for the whole world.

Bleeding Edge

Neil Perlin is looking for participants for the "Beyond the Leading Edge" presentation at the STC Summit in May. Where I stand (click to enlarge):

Click to enlarge.

Curling

The winter Olympics are here and so again is curling. I polish my miniature curling stone paperweight and put on my team USA curling sweat shirt and I'm in my quadrennial state of euphoria.

I discovered it about 10 years ago in Canada watching the women's national final on TV in a pub in Victoria. The teams wore plaid skirts as part of their uniforms. [...] Sorry, I was off in my happy place there for a moment. I'm back.

I worked for a guy who made an interesting metaphor using curling once. We were doing a workshop on employee empowerment and someone asked him what he would do if an employee made a big mistake. His answer was, "I saw a sport called curling last week. Someone slides a stone along the ice and the other team members go along side with brooms trying to influence its direction as it makes its way toward its goal. Unlike bowling, where you throw the ball and then stand back and watch. If someone makes a big mistake bowling, I'll fire them. If they make a big mistake curling, well, we'll learn our lessons and move on."

The other thing I like about curling is it looks like a sport you could play with a beer close by.