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.

 

Of Enterprises and UX (and my feeble attempt at humor)

Moiself back to blogging...and the topic of choice one that has been discussed before on this blog here. But I'm wiping the slate clean, and starting from scratch.

So why do we need good UX in the enterprise? Why does Dan the Robot (I hate my job!) who is a data entry operator entering a couple of hundred records everyday in the same form need good UX? Or Midas the Dashboard Freak (I love trend curves!) who is the Founder CEO who looks at the same dashboard on the BI portal and once a week does a bit of drill down?

Answer - Dan is just weeks away from being certified of OCD. Midas will soon want to see trend curves of some other company.

Bob (I hate keyboard shortcuts) is replacing Dan and can't figure out how to save the record he has so painstakingly typed in, moving from field to field using a mouse (snicker snicker). Bob is, to his credit, smart and looks for every possible synonym of "Save" but no luck. He doesn't want to click the wrong button, and after a few minutes, the new web-based ERP application times out and asks him to log in again.

The ERP application doesn't automatically save drafts a la Gmail. It also doesn't have a simple java-script validation which lets him know when he hasn't saved the last record if he by mistake clicks on the wrong button.

Bob is about to embark on the unenviable journey of typing in 30 fields of a purchase order again. But before he does that, he calls the ERP vendor's customer support. By the time Bob tells them his problem, which form he is on, and finally being told he was supposed to hit the "Upload" button, its 30 minutes of support staff and employee bandwidth wasted. Heck, building the save draft feature and a java-script popup would have taken that long if you had a good developer.

The ERP vendor's problem, as their customers grow in employees, so does support staff. And what about training the support staff and the new customer employees? They have to hire more trainers. But first the trainers have to be trained, but the next version is on its way out....and so on and so forth.

You get the idea, so we'll leave Midas's replacement alone.

But how do you redefine (rather create) the UX for an application that is on version 8.114, with each customer having customized it for years, both UI and business logic? Each customer has also done in-house customization in the form of custom fields, workflows, screens, integration with other applications etc etc. Let’s assume for the moment that the application is well designed, and has a clean separation between logical layers so that it is possible to just do up the UI without touching the business layer (those familiar with some niche enterprise apps will know this is quite a big assumption).

My thoughts in steps below:

1. Start with workflows, identify a few key ones which are frequently used and can deliver significant reduction in support calls. Refer the years of support desk data, talk to end users, training staff, in simple words as many users as possible from all sides. Some enterprise app vendors have partnerships for support, custom development, training etc and they need to figure in the group also.
2. Figure out how each workflow has been customized, pick the most common customizations, incorporate this into the workflows, and this becomes your fodder.
3. Most enterprise app workflows have multiple actors, each doing their bit to keep it chugging along to its logical endpoint. Identify them, know them, understand them.

• How many times each actor does it in a day?
• Do they do it in batches or as and when it comes to them?
• Business criticality of each task which indicates their position in the corporate ladder or whether there is a dedicated person for the task?
• How many people do that task in a typical organization?
• Profile each actor on tech awareness, age, qualification, and maybe even the level of churn in a typical org for that role.

4. Now you know whose life you are going to make easier, and it’s time to get down and dirty. You redefine the UX while working with a few wise ones of the "I write code" variety who can evaluate feasibility. The end product of this should be a set of wireframes for each workflow. The most important aspect to be considered here is that these are workflows a lot of people are USED to. Doing a complete rethink with no consideration of how they do it currently is going to meet with stiff resistance. A complete rethink has to be done in phases, with end users being trained gradually to use the new improved UX. A small user study at this point might be useful in gauging the amount of resistance you are likely to face with the new UX.
5. Create a prototype of new UX based on the wireframes which comes as close as possible to the actual application.
6. Test this prototype, by recruiting actual users from customer companies. You know the actors, and also the common denominator of their profile characteristics. Create a good sampling frame. A good usability testing tool should be used and Morae comes to mind. Focus group discussions can also help here to gather overall opinion on the layout, organization, and navigation.
7. Feed test results back, and iterate the prototype as required.
8. Identify the standard enhancements, as these will be implemented across the application.
9. Develop the new UX, but only for the identified workflows. Probably not fully, but to the extent that a complete impact analysis can be accomplished.
10. Evaluate the cost of each standard enhancement across the app.
11. Create a comprehensive road map based on:

• Cost of each standard enhancement.
• Development/testing effort for each enhancement.
• Non-standard enhancements which need to be done when redesigning other workflows. This also has to consider the discovery time required for these workflows. However, this effort shouldn't be as lengthy as before. This is based on the assumption that the initial workflows selected are a good representation of the entire gamut of UX issues across the entire application.

12. Develop the new UX, considering time for usability study for new workflows taken up. Again, this shouldn't take as much time as before.

There are many areas above where I am debating with myself. Those I leave for the next post. Meanwhile, I humbly request all of you to criticize the above process to death which would drive the content for my next post :).

Microsoft's Open XML is now a Standard

This just off the press. And no April Fool's joke, it got slashdotted to me.

The ISO approved Microsoft's Open XML as a standard putting it in the same league as PDF, HTML and ODF. For those who haven't been following the debate, Microsoft has been lobbying for this for more than a year now ("over 14 months of intense review", according to MSFT) and fighting opposition from IBM and Sun.

The implications:

• This gives Office 2007 a big boost, marketing wise. With competition coming in from online office tools by the likes of Google and Zoho, having control over a standard is a big deal. (Zoho supports OOXML currently, btw.)
• Apple, Novell, and even IBM now are writing apps that support OOXML.
• It will setback the adoption of Open source Office tools in the mainstream; national bodies of countries vote for these ISO standards.
  

Why should you care about this? If you have anything to do with writing applications for document management, content management, office business applications, interoperability, this is a format you need to understand. More work for us to do.

Problem is, OOXML is still buggy. From Rob's article

Among the defects are some rather serious ones such as:

• storage of plain text passwords in database connection strings
• Undefined mappings between CSS and DrawingML
• Errors in XML Schema definitions
• Dependencies of proprietary Microsoft Internet Explorer features
• Spreadsheet functions that break with non-Latin characters
• Dependencies on Microsoft OLE method calls
• Numerous undefined terms and features

The April fool's joke on this has to be from Linux fans.

Finally invisible mode on Gmail Chat..!!

I had written a post about missing feature on Gtalk- invisible mode. Last weekend I saw that Gmail Chat added invisible mode feature. It gives flexibility to the user to be in invisible/visible mode.

But this feature wasn’t added to Gtalk which is almost the replica of Gmail chat. So, if a user has logged in to Gtalk and Gmail chat simultaneously then Gmail chat doesn’t allow user to change the mode to invisible mode. I hope soon Google would add this feature to Gtalk also.

Mars Vs Venus?

Rhea (my 6 year old) and I were fooling around with Lego blocks today afternoon and had an impromptu design contest.

We built little cars.

Here is mine. Stark in black and white. Military-sh. Macho. Single seater

 

 

 

 

 

.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is hers. Audacious colors. Beach buggy. Centered driver seat. Family car. And flowers! Flowers on a car where headlamps ought to be !

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which one would you buy?

What is the lesson in here for software?

How far would you go for help ?

 

 

                                                                    *

Junk folder

Just realized why my junk filter was being ineffective!

With four potential options, the mind somehow imagines two options for blocking, and two for marking safe. (Is it just that or is there a muscle memory  where an older version of Outlook had a "add Sender's domain to blocked list?)

 

Simple grouping would make this UX more usable. Just a seperator line between the first and the second option.

Better still, the option label starting with the actual action. For example "Block Sender...", "Block sender's domain", "Allow Sender..." etc. In the current form, you need to read to the third or fourth word to know the difference...

Would you miss Usability if it weren't there?

I've firmly believed that developers have as much to do with user experience as designers and functional analysts or product managers - if not more. Look at the checkbox in the screen that says "Erase after Importing".


Thanks to the way it is implemented, you can check/uncheck it anytime during the import process, any number of times. It just picks up the last state of the checkbox after import is done.

Obvious, you may say. But let's look under the hood to understand how this could have got killed.

The right way to implement this is (don't read too much into the syntax, this is just to illustrate the example):

for (int index: items) //for each item{
import(index); //do whatever it needs to import
}
boolean eraseOnImport = chkErase.getValue();// read the checkbox state

if(eraseOnImport){
for (int index: items) //for each item
{
delete(index);
}
}

A developer could at the code above and say - Whoops! 2 for loops iterating over the same list is suboptimal - so rewrite it as:

boolean eraseOnImport = chkErase.getValue();// read the checkbox state
for (int index: items) //for each item
{
import(index);
if(eraseOnImport){
delete(index);
}
}

Less lines of code, less variables used, less memory consumed, less processing time.
Two birds, one stone.
All valid code optimization techniques.
Wonderful.
But as a feature, this would mean - the first state of the checkbox gets read. You cannot change your mind once the import starts.


The lack of the flexibility doesn't make the feature less usable, but its presence pushes the usability up by a notch.

It is small things like these that constitute the difference between Customer Satisfaction and Customer Delight, don't you think?

The six disciplines of User Experience

As envisioned by Donald Norman and inspired by his book "The invisible computer".
The following skills are required for building the best user experience into a product (could be any product from hi-tech to manufacturing)

1. Field studies - Observing potiential users doing their tasks in their normal settings. Skills require careful and systematic observation and usually come from the fields of anthropology and sociology.
2. Behavioral designers - People who create a cohesive model for the product based on a detailed task analysis of the users. They mesh the task requirements with the skills and capabilities of the intended users and this model becomes the basis for engineering design.
   Skills required for this come from the cognitive science and experimental psychology.
3. Model builders - People who rapidly build prototypes and product mock-ups that can be tested even before the real technology is ready. Skills for this usually come from people with a designing and programming background (information architects) and architecture and industrial design.
4. User testers - These people are usually involved in performing usability and feasibility studies. Through rapid user-testing studies , they enable to iterate through designs in order to meet the real needs of the users. Skills for this come from experimental psychology.
5. Graphical and industrial designers - At this stage, the aesthetics of the product are brought in through people who have experience in graphical and industrial design, and the "joy" and "pleasure" of using the product come into picture. Not only must the product designed merge the conceptual model and behavioral aspects but it must also meet varoius requirements of technology. These skills are usually brought in by people from schools of art, design and architecture.
6. Technical writers - The goal of these people should be to show the technologists how to build things that do not require manuals. However in the real world scenario, they are usually brought in after the product is built and are asked to write usage manuals. The technical writers should be able to understand the audience, what the intended users require of the product and how they can go about getting their tasks done through the product. The technical writers should be an integral part of the development team, so that the product is built so well that no instruction manual will be required.

So here's the deal, in a typical technology product, there is no luxury of time to go about doing all the above mentioned steps and in many cases some of the steps can't be executed because the target audience characteristic is too far and wide.

What do you think is the best model that can work for a typical web based application scenario in order to make sure that the real needs of the user are met ?

Feature Design Open Challenge

What goes on in your mind when someone says Library Management System? You usually dust it off with "College project", "Oh, no! Not another" (even "fake resume"). True, designing or developing library applications is treated like a Hello world problem for spec creation, feature breakup, OO design and development. It is a rat trap, a wheel, that someone is always reinventing.

Why am I writing about it then?

I discovered this wonderful feature as I was looking for a book at my local public library. (See highlight below).



There, amongst all the actions/searches clutter (we'll discuss the form design later) was a "Nearby items on shelf".

The closest one could come to actually browsing books in the library. I'm sure you have spent enough time in libraries and bookstores browsing shelves to know how valuable that is to discovering books. Translate this into online KPIs - more time spent on the site, potentially more transactions.

The more I thought about it, the more I realize that designing (I include spec-ing) this feature isn't straightforward - it isn't a "find more in category" or "more by this author". It could be as simple as a list of next accession numbers or as complex as a recommendation engine (a virtual shelf opens up possibilities).

So here's the Open Challenge: How would you design this feature? What would your search results show, how would you arrange the shelves and how would you handle special cases? The best idea gets a Barnes and Noble (for US residents) or a Crossword (India) gift card.

Did I hear UX in enterprise ! Yippie

Great piece of news to kick the new year off :
Fresh from Ajaxworld News Desk: 2008 Prediction: "The User Experience (UX) Meme Will Reach the Enterprise" — In SYS-CON's annual round-up of technology predictions, Brad Abrams, a Group Program Manager at Microsoft, highlighted the likelihood of what he called 'the UX meme of the consumer facing world [leaking] into the enterprise' and noted: 'The days of the battleship gray, forms of data application as the king of the enterprise are numbered because of an imperative towards richer visualization of complex and interconnected data. While there will always be a need for the traditional sort of application, by the end of 2008, it is no longer the only element of the corporate landscape.'

But then, we saw it coming for a long time. Thanks Brad.

I would like to take this argument a little further to another natural extension , yet long overdue rethink on UX in the enterprise context. Bear with me. This might test your patience and mental image of the UX meme.

Think enterprise UX and a strong association with enterprise software automatically emerges. Enterprise software with battleship gray and passport registration forms variety. A mother ship software orchestrating faceless departmental warriors and well oiled processes to get things done the way your TQM charged COO prescribed it. Or the one your CTO from DOS/mainframe generation felt 'fits the bill'. And in case your CXO comes from the Led Zep fan base ( count yourself lucky), you might get a blog or two, pastel grey shadows and maybe even an internal portal for free exchange of ideas and movie tickets. Life is good. So, in this year, expect major UX related investment to repaint your mothership or expect to see your cool dude CXO to be featured as Time magazine’s person of the year for revolutionary thinking.

So what's that got to do with UX as we know it ? Couple of key things are horribly wrong in the above imagery :

1. The very definition of UX in enterprise context - that's a semi metaphysical point.
2. The implication of UX in enterprise context - the hard hitting, almost physical point.

#1 : Forgive me this digression but enterprises ( and all associated paraphernalia like process, people, promotions) exist for delivering value to clients/customers. So, by definition, UX in this context too might just anchor around them. Fixing enterprise software UX is a worthy pursuit( about time too) but it goes far beyond that. I would like to believe that the U in UX for enterprise refers to the customers and that's what the UX design should focus on. So, you accept the point and you build your flagship product with kickass UX designed in. Good, you are already in a progressive minority. But what if your product is essentially a service ? Now, you are one amongst 90% of all listed business. Bad place to get stumped. Ergo : Think hard and think differently. Then the problem statement for UX in your enterprise reads [How do I design for UX in my client facing services ?]. It's a fundamental shift in UXthink in the enterprise context. A. It has got very little to do with products .B. It has got a lot to do with people who do not use your enterprise IT. Fix the internal ERP and CRM UX and you have essentially designed for the wrong set of users! Enterprise SOA is good, single sign on is smart, knowledge wikis are cool but they are not an end in themselves. They exist to deliver something else to someone outside your org boundary.

#2 : If you did accept my point above, we have agreed to look at designing a customer experience around your service. Now, that's something that has very fluid boundaries. You might look at it as a buy-sell experience and be done. Or you might look at it as creating a lasting partnership. Not that one is better than the other though lot of gurus have extreme opinions about it. That's beside the point. What matters is your customer's experience during each and every contact. What one might call moment's of truth. The mad minute when all he has read and heard about you is forgotten and all that matters is the specific experience during that call/meeting/handshake. Moment's of truth can be physical, remote or anywhere in the space time continuum [linkedin profile, blog posts, website popups, office design, the lady in your reception, even your office fire escape ! Yeah, we had one customer checking that out too !]. And he/she is absolutely right in forming opinions based on each of these. It is his idea of forming tangible ideas about the intangibles. And designing such experience levers ought to be the key UX design goal for the enterprise.

That’s a pretty hard nut to crack. For starters it is an open ended problem. And it is an all pervasive challenge. Think of it this way. Your top 10 customers meet your CEO once a month/quarter depending on how big you are. So, that’s 1 moment of truth delivered flawlessly by an experienced champion. But the same client talks to your helpdesk thrice every day, meets your project lead once a day, accesses your invoice systems once a month, reads the change request form once a fortnight and it may not even be the same guy who is doing all this. Hence the number of ‘moments of truth’ are order of magnitude higher. Is the enterprise UX designed to make life easy for him ? How do you fix them one experience at a time for the organization you belong to ? Can we define workflows, persona, experience skins or do rapid protos ? Whose responsibility is it anyway ?

If you belong to the overwhelming majority who delivers services for a living , how do you think beyond products and apply the concepts to intangibles ? And oh, do fix that internal ERP UX while you are at it.

Ux Unleashed Roundup of 2007

A very happy new year to you and your families on behalf of the team that brings you Ux Unleashed. Thank you all for giving Ux Unleashed your time.



Thought I'd spend a moment rounding up some of the posts in Ux Unleashed that stood out - each for its own reason. The idea is to give you a sampling of whats gone by, no grading or rating of any sort.

It all started with Sunil's holler in the darkness with a suggestion on making MSN Messenger smarter.

I'd like to say there was no stopping us then, but thats wrong. We took some tangents before we our bearings right, but we got there. From product reviews to humor, from ipods to irons, we've covered some range. And in some sense we're still getting there.

I'm opening the jewelry box to show off the gems.

First, some insightful posts that probably deserve to get some more readership. These were written early (when we had very few readers): Arun's post on data representation, Kiran's post on Web 2.0 UX, Sunil's post on implicitly rating media content. I loved these, let me know what you think of them.

Upma's post on Invisibility mode in GTalk is an SEO dream come true. According to our site analytics, this post is the most common landing page from search engines thanks to the use of niche keywords. A lesson for us bloggers.

Some posts that caused debate and discussion:

• Kiran's stance on GTalk
• Sowmya's post about the Twitter support page
• Upma's point on improving the way Gmail allows one to add attachments

Sunil wrote this post about a common mistake while sending attachments, and there were some
pretty diverse solutions suggested. I suggested a non-obtrusive solution and wrote up a mini-spec in this post. Sunil abstracted it to a philosophical level, and I quote from his post (some typo corrections mine)

Good user experiences make things happen - the way you wanted them to - without you having to. By being a natural extension of the thought process. Compensating for discipline or memory or structure.

Better user experiences are not noticed. Just enjoyed at a subconscious level. Like a walk on a quiet beach at sunrise.

Which were your favorite posts or topics?

What was the most memorable post or remark you've seen on Ux Unleashed?

Tell us about it. (You can omit linking to posts while commenting if its too much effort to search the archives.)

Twitter poster mashup

Nice concept ! The new Twitter poster from Spanish company Come n Click Networks provides a mashup of Twitter users sized relatively to the influence of each Twitter user, based on the number of followers and the number of Tweets the populars make.

These posters are now available for the United States, Japan, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Australia, Italy, Mexico, Canada, France and Taiwan, in addition to a global poster on the front page. Now this is a nice concept and goes to show how mashups can surface up a lot of important information.

However I wonder what would be the real usefulness of something like. It's eye candy! yes, no doubt about that, but could this lead to a digg style user rating mechanism in Twitter ?

How do you think this can be leveraged and can you build a business idea through this mashup ?

Signup and don't feel a thing

For those who may not know, IndiBlogger is a network of bloggers of Indian origin. Bloggers can list their blogs, share, favorite and discover new blogs. I recently listed the UXUnleashed blog on the site and found one of the most delightful sign-up forms I've seen.

1. The form to sign up for an account and enlist your blog is the same. And it isn't called "Sign up to IndiBlogger now!". It is a form for the user to actually do something useful on the site.
2. The form elements echo the core idea of having the seamless user experience. You provide the site details first - the username is just your email and password come in later. And all you need to sign up is an email and password.

Some suggestions I have for the creators of the form

1. Include a captcha, just to prevent spam. A free platform to promote a website is a juicy target.
2. Integrate with OpenID, so that users who have an OpenID can use it. That's a one field form. Wordpress and Blogger support OpenID sign-in and commenting so it is likely that a large number of users (will or) have an OpenID. [I don't want to go off topic here. Please leave me a comment if you have further questions.]
3. Autocomplete on the Tags field to encourage people to re-use tags.
   

There's also no way to confirm whether the user is really in or from India, but that's okay. We Indians are trusting. :)

Have you found an interesting sign-up procedure on the web? Let us know about it, and do mention what struck you as interesting in that form.

The problem of Destroying the Web 2.0 look

I stumbled upon this piece of writting from Elliot Jay Stocks, a reputed designer and a popular speaker here. It's a good take on approaching differentiation through design and he outlines the reasons we go wrong when designing the Web 2.0 look. It's a good read and I would encourage you to look at it.

His basic analysis is that
1. The design elements are getting repetative leading to a cliched look
2. Web 2.0 may seem like an aesthetic relook at UX but in reality , it is far beyond just design.

Therefore, we need to approach design differently and match elements to context. Ergo, destroy the Web 2.0 look and go for designs that stand out.

I have a couple of problem accepting this analysis.

But before that, let me outline why I think it would have resonated immediately with lot of readers, including me.
1. It is easy to sympathize with a non conformist POV because it plays into the my need for a new perspective, little spice, more variety, leftist titillations etc.
2. It is easy to poke a hole or two , easier than engineering a whole new look at any rate. Hell, even Shilpa Shetty and Microsoft are objects of hatred in some communities !

Having said that, this is my take on the analysis.

1. It comes across as more of a bored yawn than an invigorating contra point. What he is doing is pointing out standard design tenets and expecting the audience to realize their folly. Imagine if I wrote a similar presentation saying all wheels are round and hence conclude that GM ought to think out of the box henceforth. Point is these design concepts work and users love it. I will keep my friendly bevel, seductive shadow and pleasing pastels over DOS teletype and Roadrash colors. Thanks for the progress.
2. His counter example about ‘big name designers’ are outright shallow. A > they are not big name web apps company; B > the UX examples propped up are cluttered , punkish, dirty, hurried and unfriendly, to say the least.
3. His suggestion that over usage makes the look clichéd begs the wheel example once more. If something works, I would rather use it than be left looking like Australopithecus. That’s the reason to use it and that’s the technique to ape as well. Big designers can have their field day trying out cutting edge revolutionary concept but if their evening wear, plastic bridal wear and horrendous page layouts are anything to go by, thank you once again.
4. His conceptual defense is valid and so are his conclusions. Some do think that it’s all about the look and there is some need for education. But that is a minority segment. For the rest Web 2.0 means more about community than anything else. And as long as we design for that , all other goals are secondary.

He makes the point about understanding what concepts work in which context. Well, the very design concepts he picks on works brilliantly in Web 2.0 context (if user adaptation numbers and usage frequency are anything to go by). It’s more worthwhile to try being original/creative in solving the business problem you had set out to design a solution for than spending your money on big name designers to create a Jackson Pollock. Spare the poor users and spare my bevel edged pastel shaded shadows.

Life is good. I see a subtle outer glow.

Mix ups

Continuing on from my previous post about the non apparent UX improvements in Vista...

 

Noticed a little hyperlink called Mixer at the bottom of the volume control (..access it with a single click on the volume icon in systray)

Gives you access to this fabulous dialog box.

It shows you all open applications that are capable of making a sound. It allows you to use the left most control (Speaker/head) phone to decide the over all volume. And then allows you to control the relative volume of the rest of the applications)

Watching a cricket match on an illegal site :) without commentary yet want to hear a speaker on live meeting without the new mail to ring a bell while allowing MSN messenger to ping you?

Beautifully done...

 

BTW. Post number 100. Many many thanks to everyone who has participated with bricks and bouquets, blogs and comments.

Thanks

Hilarious Windows (Vista) Error

via Gizmodo



So let me lay it out for you: Windows Problem Reporting has encountered a problem. Because of this problem, Windows needs to shutdown the service. Ok so far.

But it will also notify you if a solution is available. How can you do that when you are shutting down your notification service?

Reminds me of those movies where a dying man reveals only half the secret he's being killed for.

Yahoo's new WPF messenger for Vista

Yahoo released their new version of the popular Y! messenger with an exclusive version built for Vista on WPF. This is currently only for preview. The UX is brilliant, and this app brings more of a human touch to conversations with smooth transitions and the likes.

The app however does not run on XP even if you have .NET 3.0 and the other jazz. But this looks and feels so much like a native Vista app, including the richness and the transparencies. This new version also provides a good deal of customization, with the usual laundry list of features. I found these two features to be extremely useful

• The Vista gadget which comes along with this IM is very useful and enables you to drag and drop your favorite contacts on to your sidebar so that you can ping them from there itself.



• Being able to switch between different people that I'm chatting with in a single window.

If you thought that IM was just about sending and recieving messages, then this app is surely set to change that impression. But the bigger question is, 'What do you think provides more value' - a quick and dirty IM chat client like Gtalk (also built into your gmail) or an app like this which provides a great UX. What do you think ?

Give before you demand...

In my search for a good video editing software (any recommendations?), landed up on the Pinnacle Studio web page and was trying to find the nearest brick and mortar to buy the software.

This is what I got.

Not only can I not expand a zip-code based search without a radius parameter, would  it not have been F-DAU had they just showed the nearest dealer based on what ever information they had? Wasn't this a fabulous opportunity for continuity of experience by suggesting other ways to buy? etc?