Missing Chrome Alert

Its been a long while that I am using Google Chrome, and I have made it my default, permanent browser.

So, like everyday I was using Chrome today and had opened multiple tabs. I wanted to close a tab and instead of pressing Alt + F4 for closing that particular tab, I pressed Crtl+F4 and entire window closed with all the tabs. One simple message or alert could have improved the User experience drastically - "Do you want to close all tabs?". Below are the screen shots of the alerts by IE7 and Firefox.

I tried to recover the closed tabs by opening Chrome again and looking for closed tabs in "recently closed tabs", by unfortunately couldn't find any information. I also tried to browse through the history, but it didn't help as the history is displayed according to the time you open the pages rather than the time you close the pages. Displaying the history according to the time you open the pages makes sense, but adding a small alert can improve the user experience.

Bad Habit?

Not sure if its just me! I am very used to double-clicking on the {control button} as its called on top left corner of a window to close it, rather than use the "X" on the top right corner, guess its a very old habit.

More recently, having trouble getting accustomed to the "false window" that is displayed to make the window look cooler. Taking example of Windows Live messenger, the window I see looks like

By force of habit, i double click on the window icon on the top left corner and the window maximises, rather than close :)

If i hit "Alt", the window reveals the control button and that works as normal. I double-click on the messenger icon and that closes the window

Is this a problem with me or should the thought have gone into the application design since the double-click-to-close was always provided as a feature in "normal" windows.

I am now having to get used to "normal" way of closing windows :)

The 'Magnifying glass' mystery

An icon with a magnifying glass image is usually mapped to a 'zoom' function...that's what I thought till someone pointed out that in MS Word, Excel (which are very other commonly used applications), the print preview icon has a magnifying glass superimposed on a blank page. Now, how is that supposed to convey that the action on clicking the button will be a 'print preview'? !!

How is it that we are used to clicking on this icon for viewing a print preview without confusing it with a zoom option?

Any thoughts?

How-to: Listen to what your users are saying

...Even if they aren't talking to you.

This morning, I get a tweet (a Twitter message) from someone complaining about her Firefox 2 frequent crashes.

I've experienced Firefox 2 crash at random on Vista, and I wasn't the only one. (Aside: I'm happily settled on Firefox 3 now.) My response to her tweet.



When I checked my tweets a couple of hours later, I had a reply from @firefox_answers


I don't follow @firefox_answers, nor do they follow me. I didn't even know they existed.

But they are listening.

How do they do it? The easy part is getting to the tweets. Look at Twitter Search or one of hundreds of twitter monitors for keywords. Lots of companies use twitter to promote and gauge community perception.

The tough part is listening and responding. I am amazed at the attention that Mozilla pays to its customers. I have been a fan of Firefox for its product, now I tip my hat to their customer service. Try it for yourself. Pose a question or issue on firefox on twitter - I'm sure @firefox_answers is listening.

Invert Selection

Would that not be a good feature to have? I have been in this situation umpteen number of times where I have chosen to see some specific rows in Microsoft Excel; once done reviewing the data, I would want to see only the rest of the rows, this would have been possible by providing a “Invert Selection” option along with the (Select All) that is provided by default.

Wonder why this is not the case. I have seen the invert selection is very few applications I have used, one that comes to mind is Picasa (oh maybe only Google does provide it?).

Thoughts?

Jesus Joel !

Joel says here, Don't hide or disable menu items

A long time ago, it became fashionable, even recommended, to disable menu items when they could not be used.

Don't do this. Users see the disabled menu item that they want to click on, and are left entirely without a clue of what they are supposed to do to get the menu item to work.

Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there's some reason you can't complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why.

I disagree completely. Disabled stands for not in a position to be used. It talks about the thought process and the diligence that leads the control to be in that state. If it cannot be used, it should not be available (Should it disappear? Well, lets leave it that one for a different blog...)

 

Leave it disabled, I would say, just let the user know what he needs to do to avail to the functionality.

(to be continued... if Joel takes up the debate...)

Crying wolf?

A trial of a speed-breaker visual illusion to slow down the traffic....

What do you think? Good usability? Bad usability?

Plug me in ...

The first thing I have find myself doing on entering a hotel room during a business trip is looking for power outlets.

It is (not) funny how much trouble interior decorators take to hide these "ugly" holes. They strategically put them behind heavy pieces of furniture, behind doors, behind headboards. After going down on all fours and moving these obstacles, you find the outlets over used with wires running to the refridgeratorm, lamps TV and one has to decide if the news of the day is more important than ambient light to get some juice for my power drained laptop, phone and iPod.

Last week in Indiana, I came across this ugly little lamp virtually boasting the two power outlets and a LAN connector.

I did not really care how ugly the lamp was...

my voice is my password (command)....

The title is derived from a 1992 movie - Sneakers, which I absolutely love. Total geek movie at the time :) in which they fool a voice recognition system.

Now the reason I remembered is this post on Techcrunch IT which got me thinking. Will voice ever replace the keyboard+mouse? Today I also read another post which asks a related question - touch will replace the keyboard+mouse?

The conclusion from the two posts seems to be that interfaces still need to be designed considering the eyes and hand for any complicated task/task carried out in an enterprise/public environment. There is no going beyond QWERTY and the rodent until the day they figure out how I can plug a computer directly into my brain and tell it what to do :). I agree, what about you?

The usability of usability statistics

I have always loved statistics as a subject - chi square tests, confidence levels, Weibull distribution et al...this an entire discipline which enables me to say with an exact confidence level on how much what I know about a small group of people is applicable to humankind as a whole.

Statistics can reveal some quite interesting things - as Mr. Levitt has pointed out in his albeit pompously titled but thoroughly entertaining book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

Onto statistics on usability. There are innumerable. And I don't know what to do with them. For an exhaustive list of what you can derive with just 4 pieces of data:
1. Task completion
2. Completion time
3. Satisfaction ratings
4. Errors encountered
go here.

I would rather use SUS or System Usabilty Scale, a very simple measure of overall usability which was invented more than 20 years ago. For a very short document on its use, go here. In a study conducted on the various usabilty satisfaction survey questionnaires and their efficacy presented at the UPA Conference in 2004 available here, the SUS was found to give the most reliable results.
Excerpt:
One of the simplest questionnaires studied, SUS (with only 10 rating scales), yielded among the most reliable results across sample sizes.
–Also the only one whose questions all address different aspects of the user’s reaction to the website as a whole.

Indicentally, Morae - one of the most popular usabilty testing tools, comes pre-packaged with SUS.

So what to do with the rest of the statistics? I personally don't use them and not sure of how I could. I think conducting usability tests is an explicit recognition of the possibility that there might be usability flaws, and given the subjective nature of usability, it is better to gather them from a whole bunch of representative users than a few experts. Usability statistics just give you numbers which reinforce what you learn from the qualitative feedback. Analyzing the qualitative feedback gives more actionable information than statistics.

But if you really need an easy comparison point between an earlier and redesigned UX, I would use the SUS.

The technology in UX

I'm currently wrapping up a UX consulting assignment for a financial services ISV in the east coast. Quite a rewarding experience, and a test of the process I posted on this blog here.

An interesting problem to solve was this:

How do you make it transparent to the user that the huge amount of data being manipulated in a desktop application comes from a server?

To give more context, imagine you had around 5-10K rows of data, some 30-50 columns in each row in an Excel spreadsheet. This data keeps changing as there are other users updating, as well as the system. New rows also keep getting added.

Your user is someone who monitors this data, making sure the system is running as expected, making changes as required. To enable this, the application allows slicing and dicing, custom views, conditional formatting etc.

The problem restated - as the user is using the various features, how does the application make the user feel the data is on his desktop rather than on the server? Also, now that you've provided these features, how do you reduce the server load when each client submits a query every few seconds?

The solution - load the huge amount of data on the user's machine, and sync this with the server every few seconds.

However, this doesn't solve the problem of the server load. So instead of executing the query on the database every few seconds, the query could be executed every few seconds and kept in a cache on the server. This is still inefficient, so each time the application receives data, it also gets when it should make the next request, allowing you to distribute the load on the servers.

What does this allow? The user now doesn't feel the data being updated. It happens in the background, and any changes to the data currently being viewed is done unobtrusively. There is no longer the need to click a "Refresh" button to get the latest data. The response to any filtering or custom view being applied is instant. For all the user knows, the data is on their desktop.

Firefox 3: First Impressions

Today is Firefox 3 download day. Although FF3 beta 3's been available a few weeks, I religiously download and install Firefox 3 today to do my bit towards setting the record. Download Firefox 3 from here, if you haven't already.

Before I give you my comments on its usability, a little aside on the browsers I use, just to set context.

Firefox has been my default browser since version 1.2 (or thereabouts). Over 90% of my desktop browsing is via Firefox. I also use Opera at times - I think it is a pretty nifty browser and really the forerunner for feature introductions. They came up with tabbed browsing, for example. I use Internet Explorer (now IE 8 Beta) as well - Sharepoint sites render better on IE. I like Flock too, but it plays second fiddle to Firefox only because I use so many plug-ins/add-ons on Firefox.

Enough digression.

Here are my first impressions, usability wise. For an application that gets used so much, usability is also a function of time - a novelty today may become an irritant tomorrow.

1. "What was that site again?". How many of us have tried rummaging browser history to find that great blog post we read, or event we heard about? Address (URL) matching is passe. Firefox 3 matches words within the page title and tags on that page. Also sorts itself by time (how recently you viewed that page) and frequency. Neat. This is a type of feature that gets refined over time.

This feature could have been made a little smarter, though. Try typing 'com' and you'll see what I mean. I get google.com as the first choice. It also looks inside ID fields that form part of the URL - that makes it more confusing. The transition (appearance) of this drop down could be more subtle - it is a bit of a distraction when it appears, so I can see some users getting put off by this (they have the option to turn it off, btw).

2. Enough has been said about Firefox performance woes on Vista - and I have been at the receiving end of it more than I'd like to. Performance and Security have been a focus area this time round, with over 15,000 fixes made. Although it is difficult to tell right away, I hope this means less trouble with Firefox on Vista for me.

3. I usually have dozens of tabs open as I browse, so I'm pleased with the simple animated transition on the tabs - a little carousel like. I really wish they'd made an improvement on where the a "new tab" shows up. I always think that clicking on "Open in New Tab" should create a tab to the immediate right of the current tab - so you know it is right there. Firefox opens new tabs at the rightmost end of the list of tabs (not a 3.0 feature, its always been so) - painful when you have 10+ tabs already open. You either a) have to scroll scroll till you get there or b) forget that you opened the new tab or c) lose context of what you were reading earlier.

4. They've visually integrated the browser well with Vista (and Linux and Mac, apparently - I've only seen screenshots of those). Here's a couple of examples where the icons have more Vista-ish look and feel.

Why does this matter?

When you are trying to eat into Internet Explorer's market share, and move beyond techno-savvy users, you'd like to get the users "comfortable" with your application, and the more it fits in to the OS the faster you get comfortable with it. Take iTunes for example. The look and feel is (and has always been) Mac OS-like. Takes a while for users to figure their way out and get used to.

Here's a quote from Alex Faaborg's blog about firefox 3, describing its usability goals

Why do We Believe Visual Integration is Important?

We decided to focus heavily on visual integration with the platform for the following reasons:

-Cross platform applications that use a consistent appearance across different operating systems (like RealPlayer, or applications developed using Java Swing) feel foreign and strange
-The Web browser is a central part of the user’s computing experience
-We want the user’s first impression to be feeling comfortable with the UI
-If the transition in and out of Firefox is jarring, the user won’t achieve flow when completing tasks (like when you are driving a car and you realize you haven’t been thinking about driving for quite awhile, or when you are reading an interesting book and you turn pages without conscious thought).
-We want Firefox to feel like the browser your computer should have shipped with

Those of you who have worked with cross platform consistency will appreciate the ambition and rigor required to achieve this.

The sorry part about Firefox 3 is not all the Add-ons I use have been upgraded to be compatible yet, I guess they wwill be, soon enough.

What are your impressions of Firefox 3? What's your favorite Firefox feature, regardless of the version? Time to spread some Firefox love.

What do you think?

 

 

Human Experience

Yves Behar takes us on an amazing journey from carpets to condoms in his extempore at TED.

The line that sticks with me is "the design is never done..." the ellipsis being the most important word in the sentence.

 

 

BTW, Aditi is part of OLPC and proud of it....

 

**

Talkative antivirus

 

I have had Symnatec running on my laptop for several years now (corporate policy).  An anti-virus, which is what Symantec is, should  ideally work in the background, making every important decision independently and pulling the user into the loop only under super catastrophic conditions.

Symantec quite often does just  the opposite.

For example, look at this dialog box that pops up every time my computer boots up. 

The dialog box exists to inform me of existing risks and actions that I can/should take. 99% of the time, there is no risk to be reported. The dialog box still pops up with an empty grid which (1) leaves it to me to figure out the status and then (2) making me take a worthless action (of clicking the ok button) to dispose the window.

Either Symantec should not show the dialog box when there is nothing to report or very, very explicitly share the good news that my computer right now is super safe!

 

Here is another one.

The error message from hell.

A critical application (an anti-virus) is telling me that a critical task (remediation meaning weeding out the virus) has failed.

Now that my machine is probably infected with a hazardous virus written by a ravaging psychopath, all I get is an OK button.

No information about the failing task, or its criticality, or the reason for failure and most important. What should I do next ?

 

There are others that Symantec keep bludgeoning me with. Watch this space.

 

**

Sigh-n

Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam.

Departure signage listing the departure time, flight numbers, destinations and gate numbers...sorted on ...uh....departure time.

Imagine trying to find out what time the delayed flight to Seattle leaves.

They might as well sort it on gate number, it will require a part table scan anyway...

**

A dentist with yellow teeth (or recursive bad usability)

I have always wondered.

Would a customer select a usability expert company whose website has a bad user experience?

I followed the link that Vinodh has pointed out in his earlier blog. Here is a screen grab.

Notice...

1. Using the typical (and a tad boring) Web 2.0 pattern, the designer tries to create a three step process to obtain the calendar. So step one, select the language, step two select the size and whoa.. where is step 3? Is translating the third step?

It is right there, blind boy, the green box - the one that looks like an ad - is actually the action button

2. The "translate the calendar" link takes you to a landing page for YOU to translate the calendar and send it to THEM. It has no relationship to the step 1 and 2 described above

3. And what's with the grammatically incorrect sentences? Surely, this not part of the causal English syndrome, is it?

Sad. BTW, had this not been the output of a usability expert company, I would have let this one pass

Here is one of my earlier rants about another user experience magazine.

**

Raising the (scroll) bar...

 

The scroll bar on the iTunes website with labels in the "shaft" for "aimed" scrolling.

Awesome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And while on the subject of scroll bars, I have never really like the way the control renders and behaves.

1. The scroll bar is window centric and not document centric. For e.g., clicking the down button or pulling the elevator down, scrolls the document up while the action is called scrolling down.  Dyslexic.

2. Unidirectional arrow buttons on either ends of the scrollbars. So while scrolling down, if you miss the spot on the document you were looking for, you have to navigate all the way up the screen to scroll back up. I wish both ends of the scroll bars had arrow pointing up and down.

BTW, notice the scroll bar in Word 2007 (figure to the right). The page up and page down controls are (correctly) bunched together, and not laid out on the periphery of the control for symmetry

 

**

Bad Usability Calendar 2008

NetLife Research is a Norwegian based User Experience design and consulting firm. For the last couple of years they have been releasing a bad usability calendar which is meant to show examples of bad UX and usability.

This year's calendar has great examples of exaggerated use of web 2.0 design,social bookmarking proliferation, drop down menus, message feeds etc.

You can download this year's calender here.

Interesting way to portray UX and design bloopers!

Click is as click does

How much of usability is context? Twice last week, I came across instances that illustrated the risk of allowing best practices to turn into heuristics.

First, a colleague sent me this piece of Nielson wisdom to help validate a design decision:

Error prevention – Jakob Nielsen: "Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action."

A common way of eliminating error-prone conditions is to disable command actions till the action is actually valid in a business sense. But does this work every time? Maybe disabling command buttons to prevent errors works really great on an installation wizard. Or for an online financial transaction. But say you apply it to a Login screen of a web application to eliminate common error-prone conditions. So, the Login Button is not enabled until the Username and Password fields are filled by the user. This certainly does prevent a few error scenarios. But does it make sense to the end user? I'd say it would surprise the typical user - the user enters the application login screen and sees that the one action that he wants to carry out is disabled – it is not common to see the Login button disabled, so instead of entering his credentials, he begins to wonder if there is something wrong with the application.

Here's another example:

'Don't make me Click', posted by Google Tech Talks on April 2. A snippet from the Abstract:

"What's made Google search, Facebook, the iPod, and Firefox household names? They all keep interaction to a minimum. The best presentation of content is the one which requires the least number of clicks and choices. Information overload is daunting: Few clicks and choices means more people stay and use your site. Avoiding interaction seduction allows you to create interfaces that are easier to learn and faster to use with surprisingly delightful interfaces."

The talk throws up several interesting ideas and Aza Raskin is a very good speaker. The line 'The best presentation of content is the one which requires the least…' from the abstract reinforces cult wisdom about minimizing clicks on any UI. But it speaks of usability independent of context. Usability can't be universal – you can work to arrive at what's potentially the 'best' interface for a specific context, for specific user groups with specific user goals.

When it comes to consumer web sites that try to cater to large audiences distributed across the globe, good experience gets defined basis a lot of research, prototyping and usability testing. I think that Facebook offers an excellent, compelling user experience to a certain demographic – technology savvy, literate web users in the 15-40 years age group. Maybe a different demographic finds the lack of clicks disconcerting – I don't know this, but it's likely to be dangerous to assume.

Bottom-line - I'm inclined to think that when it comes to usability, there are no rules, just learnings.