Just thought I’d point to my latest UXmatters article. My idea for this article is that people get stuck at a certain point of understanding a system, and fail to progress beyond a few areas of a rich application.

 After initially becoming somewhat familiar with a system, people often continue using the same inefficient, time-consuming styles of interaction they first learned. For example, they fail to discover shortcuts and accelerators in the applications they use. Other people learn only a small portion of a product’s capabilities and, as a result, don’t realize the full benefits the product offers. Why? What can operating systems, applications, Web sites, and devices do to better facilitate a person’s progression from novice to expert usage?

It’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. Since I owed UXmatters a column, I thought I’d explore it a bit. I’m still working it out.

(Originally posted April 2005 - P.S.)

There is one constant across almost all office-based work environments: the office worker is subject to innumerable interruptions and distractions. Yet when we test software and web sites for usability, we always seek to minimize interruptions and distractions. Should we?

The usability test lab environment is a contrived setting. It is purposefully designed to eliminate (or at least minimize) distractions and interruptions. It resembles nothing so much as a laboratory for psychological experiments.

Once the test session begins, the facilitator makes every effort to ensure that the participant is free from distraction. Other than asking for occasional clarification, the effective facilitator is trained to interact in a neutral, non-judgmental, clinical manner. This allows the participant to concentrate on the tasks at hand.

However, the typical office worker deals with a range of distractions and interruptions throughout the day - some self-imposed, some from external sources.

Given the ubiquitous nature of distractions and interruptions, it might make sense to replicate some of them in the test environment. Doing so in a controlled, deliberate manner would help illuminate how the product might fare under real-world conditions.

As a hypothetical example, consider an intranet site within a large corporation that allows employees to enroll in and make changes to their benefits. Imagine also that the benefits enrollment process was user tested in the usability lab with a variety of user types ranging from administrative assistants to software engineers. For our purposes, let’s assume that it earned high marks with users during this round of testing.

However, when it’s rolled out the organization finds that a significant number of employees are committing errors when enrolling or making benefits changes. Further investigation reveals that errors are most prevalent among tech support employees and mid-level managers. Why wasn’t this revealed during user testing?

One reason could be because tech support reps’ and managers’ work time is characterized by frequent interruptions and a multitude of distractions competing for their attention. While the benefits enrollment process might “test well” in the serene confines of the lab, in this case efficient use of the web site’s interface is hindered by frequent phone calls, emails, and the vagaries of working in a team environment.

It turns out to be difficult for people to ascertain the status of the application and of the operation being performed when a constant stream of distractions and interruptions characterizes their work environment. Had this been discovered before rollout, the design could have been adapted accordingly.

Studying how people use a product under conditions that replicate the distractions and interruptions of ordinary life would reveal additional information about the product that would not necessarily be revealed by traditional laboratory testing.

I don’t know if this happens to you other bloggers… a few weeks ago I had a GREAT idea for a post, and didn’t want to write anything else until I had written the great post. As a result, I got completely blocked up and stopped writing for a while. So I haven’t posted a darn thing in weeks.

Anyway, since I have little to say here at my own little node of the Interwebs, I’m going to point you to my latest UXmatters article. It’s about an interview I conducted a few weeks back with Eva de Lera of the Open University of Catalonia. She and her colleagues are developing measures to assess users’ emotional reactions to user interfaces. Article link is below.

How Do Users Really Feel About Your Design? :: UXmatters

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Tags: UI, emotion, affect

Gerry Gaffney of UXPod fame posted a great interview with Karen Loasby of the BBC. The interview is from November; but I’m so scandalously behind in my reading/listening I’m just now getting around to it.

It’s worth a listen; it provides her unique perspective on what it’s like managing the information architecture for a major media web property. You can get the podcast here: UXpod - User Experience Podcast - Interview with Karen Loasby.

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It’s always nice to see our colleagues in neighboring disciplines talk about usability. Here’s an article from PM Toolbox that, although brief and a bit simplistic, at least shows that our colleagues understand the value of a well-designed user experience.

Oh. My. God. Amazon.com actually updated the price of “Usability Success Stories“.

Maybe some peeps will buy it now…

I’m happy to report that the publisher of “my” book “Usability Success Stories“, has lowered the price to US$60.00. With a 15% discount from purchasing via Gower’s web site, the price falls to US$51.00 plus shipping.

Yeeha.

You can click here to purchase it direct from Ashgate/Gower, or you can download the order form from this link.

(I put airquotes around “my” because I wrote 3 of the 10 chapters, edited the other contributors’ chapters, and produced or reworked the images and illustrations. So technically the book isn’t all mine. Just trying to avoid megalomania…)

I just found out that Gower has posted the first chapter of the book I edited.

The PDF of Chapter 1 can be found here: http://www.gowerpub.com/pdf/Usability_Success_Stories_Intro.pdf

I still don’t think you should buy it at 100+ dollars, though. (If you want to know why, you can read my rant.)

A few people have asked me about the presentations I gave at the User Friendly 2006 conference in Hangzhou, China earlier in November. If you’re one of them, or are just interested in seeing the PowerPoint decks, you can access them at this URL: http://www.usabilityblog.com/UF2006/.

The file starting with “Talk…” is the slide deck that accompanied my invited speaker talk. I presented about the project I led redesigning Peachtree Accounting’s user interface. Direct link is here.

The files starting with “Panel” are the slides and schedule for the panel I led, “Some Right - and Many Wrong - Ways to Incorporate Usability into an Organization.”

Enjoy.

I just looked at the sample chapters for The Usability Kit, a comprehensive resource for web site designers that explains critical usability concepts and also provides actual templates for common interactions such as login pages, help and FAQ areas, My Account pages, etc.

I really like it. It’s a great idea, and it appears to be very well executed. I downloaded the sample from SitePoint, the kit distributor, and the sample chapters read great. Dan Szuc and Gerry Gaffney cover all the right topics. I’m really glad they covered the critical information architecture concepts of faceted classification, tagging, and folksonomies.

Let me do the full disclosure thing at this point: I’ve known Dan Szuc for a few years now, and consider him a friend. And I’ve recently met Gerry Gaffney. So I’m not an impartial observer. However, I consider myself a reasonably ethical person, so if I didn’t truly feel that this resource was worth your time, I would say so. (Or more likely, I just wouldn’t blog it.)

By far the best thing about The Usability Kit is the blueprints. In providing what amount to templates for common interactions, Gerry and Dan have gone where many others fear to tread. Let’s face it: there’s only so many *good* ways to design a login box or a “Subscribe To Our Newsletter” form. And if I’m reading SitePoint’s blurb page correctl, you actually get electronic copies of the blueprints, so you can build pages from the templates. (I could be wrong about this; and besides, who builds sites with static HTML anymore? That’s so 1998…)

Unfortunately, the SitePoint sample didn’t include the chapter about user research. I am very particular about how user research is done, because I’ve seen so many ill-conceived, inefficient and biased user research projects performed by well-meaning people. So I can’t speak to how well Gerry and Dan covered this topic.

Bottom line: would I buy yet another *book* about usability for US$197? Frak no. Would I buy this kit, with all its templates and other goodies? Frak yes.

So you decide. Am I logrolling (or shilling), or pointing y’all to a quality resource?

Happy World Usability Day.

This event, now in its second year, was intended to raise awareness around the globe of how important usability is to our everyday lives. It’s succeeding beyond our wildest dreams. And that’s great.

But I’d like to introspect for just a moment here. Those of you who work in the field, stop and give yourself a mental pat on the back. And then tell yourself how fortunate you are to have stumbled upon a field that is so engaging, fulfilling, and exciting. Admit it. Every day when you wake up and go to work, you’re secretely thankful that you’re not a lawyer, a doctor, a software developer, and so on. You’re a soldier in the user experience army. And it’s the best damn career you can imagine.

You know it’s true. You tell yourself that at least once a week, don’t you?

I know *I* do…

Remember that book I was working on?

I just found out it’s gone to the printer.

It’ll be available in five or six weeks.

I was fortunate to be asked to participate in my company’s press and analyst event in May of this year. For the main event, I put together a short presentation about the user-centered design program I built at Sage Software (the marketing folks sexed it up by labeling it “Customer-Connected Design”, which I’m fine with…)

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Like every other wanna-be semi-guru in this field, I’ve written a book. OK, I really just wrote three chapters, got 10 other people to contribute chapters, and edited their contributions…but still, I think this counts as “I have a book coming out.”

It will be available in September or October of this year. It’s published by Gower, an imprint of the Ashgate Publishing Group.
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So here’s how this post started: I was intending to write a “roundup” piece touching on the various usability/user-centered design resources that were on the web and free for the taking. You know, like IBM’s Easy site, or Microsoft’s usability area. (I know they also have resources available on the MSDN site, but I couldn’t find them. MSDN.com doesn’t display right on my Mac…what a shocker…)

But when I got to this IBM resource, I just had to stop and post this as a standalone article.

IBM’s little ditty is called “EasyChart”, and it’s a teaching tool in application form. From the IBM site:

What is EasyChart? EasyChart is a charting tool that has been designed to purposefully violate well-known interface design rules of thumb (heuristics).

What is it used for? EasyChart is designed to demonstrate the effects of poor interface design has on the usability of an application or Web page.

Now this I *gotta* see. I can’t wait to download it to my PC.

Both Elegant Hack and WebWord blogged the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.
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I just checked over at Boxes and Arrows and found a neat article about automating the creation of sitemaps: The Lazy IA’s Guide to Making Sitemaps.

It is itself an update to an earlier article by Michael Angeles entitled “Automating Diagrams with Visio“.

Like most people in this field, I find myself wrestling the tools we use, and often spend much more time on formatting and tweaking than I should. Automating parts of the deliverable creation process can help alleviate this.