Re: [IxDA Discuss] Form Validation

2008-01-04 Thread Ben Hunt
I agree with Caroline on the need for UIs to exercise sufficient restraint
when people are entering data.

When designing interactions on web pages, I often refer to a little guy I
keep in my head, who's a concierge in a high-class hotel, and imagine how
he'd behave.

A great concierge, maitre d', or waiter etc. doesn't trouble you for too
much information. If they need a signature, it's made as easy as possible.
Imagine if there's a mistake. They don't peer over your shoulder as you sign
your credit card chitty in a restaurant. They give you a pen, and stand back
giving you time to fill in the data. If there's a mistake, they'll wait an
appropriate length of time and then more than likely apologise themselves
for the mistake.

If you were in a posh restaurant and the waiter was watching the pen as you
totted up the tip, and jumped with Actually, it's $15.90 in as soon as you
wrote the wrong digit, you'd just feel hassled. Surely it's no different
online.


- Ben


(Caroline wrote)
I've watched users working with forms like this. My concern is that they
pretty much all (no matter how web-savvy) seem to jerk away from the screen
in surprise as the ordinarily docile page suddenly starts changing on them
before they've even typed anything much in the field.

This worries me. For years, I've been advocating doing validations as soon
as you can, but there seems to be something 'too soon' about interrupting
the user's typing process to warn them about an error.

It seems particularly bad on Mint.com - can't type a whole email address
before it starts barking at me.

So my current advice is to refrain from interrupting the conversation in
this way. Let the user complete their entry as they naturally would, and
only seize back control of the page when they've returned control to you.
For example, by clicking on something else.



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Re: [IxDA Discuss] The applicability of NLP to interaction design.

2008-01-04 Thread Alexander Livingstone
Hah, I think I need to remember that the world is running out of space for
three letter acronyms!

Natural Language Processing certainly sounds very interesting and in an
engineering world that's abstracted and represented in algebraic variables,
I can certainly see an instant benefit for what I'm doing in understanding
the material (if *nothing* else). Lisa I've taken your recommendation of
Herb Clark's book and will grab it from Amazon forthwith.

I suppose my take on Neuro Linguistic Programming (given the limited time
I've spent looking at it) is that its techniques are based upon an model of
the patterns that our minds follow - how we learn, retain information,
behave, etc. which, assuming it is accurate, would be good for our overall
understanding of humans. So in this respect, it might be able to help to
remove a part of the uncertainty
in any design that I undertake. My 'pretend its magic' (can you tell
I've been reading?) aim for what I'm going to be
doing is that I can use behavioural patterns so that out applications can be
to our field
what Derren Brown is to 'mind reading' (If you haven't heard of him, I
suggest you go to Amazon and grab a DVD / unbox video
- it is absolutely fascinating - and great entertainment to
boot!). I gather his methods are partially
rooted in the same sort of theory that Neuro Linguistic Programming is.

It could be that it is a red herring - and human psychology as a whole is
something I just need to look at more. After all, I have virtually no
understanding of any sort of social science - I trained in Physics and Naval
Architecture, so I've a very steep learning curve ahead of me in IxD.

Re-reading this, perhaps I need to temper my enthusiasm and start slowly (
http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/bin/p12.dll?C01D844) =]

Thanks, all, for the input!

Alex.

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[IxDA Discuss] Style guides

2008-01-04 Thread Dariusz Paciorek
Hi,

Maybe someone know where I can find style guides for windows?

Thanks a lot.

Regards

Darek Paciorek


PS. Sorry if my english is bad.

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Re: [IxDA Discuss] SEO and Usability

2008-01-04 Thread Luis de la Orden Morais
If you optimize for
humans, you will be optimizing for the search engines as well...

Optimizing for the machine, on the other hand, leads to crappy, awkward
text, and if you ask me is toeing the line between blackhat and whitehat
techniques.

What Fred says above should be the rule of thumb, accessibility for humans
first lead to better SEO.

Regards,

Luis


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Re: [IxDA Discuss] Designing great user experiences for Products:References, resources, books, discussion threads, websites etc

2008-01-04 Thread Caroline Jarrett
From: Timothy Yeo [EMAIL PROTECTED]

: I've spent the last 4 years working in the user experience field for 
websites and mobile phone interfaces. Now, I'm embarking onto a new 
medium for me: consumer products.
:
: I'm looking for references, resources, books, discussion threads, 
websites etc that talk about usability testing, design guidelines and 
general advice for designing great user experiences for consumer 
products such as TVs, kitchen appliances, digital video recorders, 
household appliances etc.

Hi Tim

You might be interested in our textbook (Stone, Jarrett, Woodroffe, 
Minocha: User Interface Design and Evaluation) because it includes 
discussion of some consumer products as well as web sites and 
traditional computer interfaces. I think it would mostly be relevant 
for the way that it supports your feeling that

(Disclosure: I get a nice warm feeling when people buy the book but 
the royalties go back to the Open Unversity).

You might also be interested in 'Dynamics in Document Design (Karen 
Shriver) because she has an extended discussion of programming a VCR. 
But I'd recommend it anyway for the excellent advice on design of 
documents, especially those associated with consumer products.

Best,

Caroline Jarrett
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
01525 370379

Effortmark Ltd
Usability - Forms - Content
- Original Message - 
To: IxDA Discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2008 12:58 PM
Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Designing great user experiences for 
Products:References, resources, books, discussion threads, websites 
etc


: Hi all.
:
:
: I believe the principles of designing great user experiences are by
: and large the same, but I'd like to learn more about how it, and
: perhaps some of you are already working with this medium and have 
some
: advice to offer.
:
: Please feel free to send me the references directly or through the 
list.
:
: Thanks.
:
: Tim..
:
:
: 
: *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah*
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Re: [IxDA Discuss] SEO and Usability

2008-01-04 Thread dave malouf
I'm not an SEO expert by any means, but reading all this talk about
how CSS will effect SEO results really SCREAMS to me my point that
designing for SEO is a flawed methodology for total success. It seems
the Search Engines actually need to optimize for the real world more
than we need to optimize for them. Yes, they control the critical
mass, but they are also a responsive system in and of themselves. If
people are unhappy with their results over time they will change
their systems to make people happier.

The fact that a technology like a search engine (and a search engine
that isn't even in our design domain) is something that we even
consider is troubling to me to no end.

This is NOT the same thing as considering accessibility which is
about protecting the rights of human beings who are not of the
critical mass (majority), who need protecting by that very fact. This
is about favoring technology over human beings in total which to me is
beyond unacceptable.

I am now officially throwing my cap in the wing of anti-SEO.

Fortunately designing hardware and embedded software means this
doesn't really effect me to much ... ;)

-- dave


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Posted from the new ixda.org
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Re: [IxDA Discuss] SEO and Usability

2008-01-04 Thread Fred Beecher
On Fri, 4 Jan 2008 07:29:53, dave malouf [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 I'm not an SEO expert by any means, but reading all this talk about
 how CSS will effect SEO results really SCREAMS to me my point that
 designing for SEO is a flawed methodology for total success. It seems
 the Search Engines actually need to optimize for the real world more
 than we need to optimize for them.



I don't think anyone here is saying that SEO-focused design is good design.
I certainly agree with you that it is not. What we're saying is that
designing and structuring content for human relevance will have the side
effect of also being highly relevant to search engines.


While the search engines aren't perfect, Google at least does a very good
job of mimicking how humans determine relevance, which leads to good,
relevant search results for users. If you have two Web pages that talk about
the same topic but are structured differently, both humans and search
engines will judge them differently. The page that has the topic in the
title, subtopics in headers, and uses consistent terminology will be easier
for humans to read and comprehend compared to the page that is unstructured
and inconsistent. Similarly, a search engine will rank the structured 
consistent page higher than the unstructured  inconsistent page. So it's
happy times for everyone, human and machine alike. : )


Where the imperfections of search engines come through is where the blackhat
SEO folks get their bread and butter... keyword stuffing, duplicate content,
etc... Google's getting smarter about that sort of thing, though, and people
are getting penalized in the rankings for pulling that kind of crap. I am
*very* against that stuff. I wouldn't even call that SEO... hell, I'd call
it cheating.

I am now officially throwing my cap in the wing of anti-SEO.

 Fortunately designing hardware and embedded software means this
 doesn't really effect me to much ... ;)



Heh... This is more a Web IA problem than a pure IxD problem, so that's
definitely true. : )

- Fred

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Re: [IxDA Discuss] Designing great user experiences for Products: References, resources, books, discussion threads, websites etc

2008-01-04 Thread Gloria Petron
*Don't Make Me Think* by Steve Krug is another good one (I have it sitting
next to *Why We Buy* on my bookshelf at all times.)

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Re: [IxDA Discuss] SEO and Usability

2008-01-04 Thread Luis de la Orden Morais
Search engines are just one way for retrieval and indexing information, this
the problem with SEO: it has a very limited technological scope based on a
single model of information retrieval. A bit like a cancer for the cure, SEO
makes pages easier to rank in search engine results but then nobody said
that the page was relevant for me in first page. There's an aspect of SEO
which is very interesting indeed: keyword searching, taxonomy and linguistic
trends, but few are the SEO's who even understand what a taxonomy is all
about.

Many times the purpose of SEO is to put the page in the first positions so
that more people come to a page where they can click on the paid ads for
other pages: a bit like the salmon lifecycle, which goes all the way against
the stream so that they can lay eggs, die, then when everything is washed
downstream, eggs hatch, baby fish eats mum and dad's flesh and when they are
adults they go all the way against the stream again for no purpose in life
but populate the rivers. 

The success rate of most SEO campaigns out there are measured by the
position of the web page in the results page, which definitely produces more
traffic (another old model: traffic). It is a surge tactics, which might
work for the owner of the site, but from the user perspective, if you are
lucky to get a page with good content, good for you.

Personally, I don't use Google anymore, I go straight to Wikipedia and then
go to the links they have there. I also use Digg, which seems to me the
emerging model for search, something SEO hasn't thought of yet, after all
SEO is aimed for short-term results.

Nevertheless, there are serious SEO consultancies out there, it is hard to
spot them because there are too many failed web designers waving the SEO
banner. 

Cheers,

Luis

I'm not an SEO expert by any means, but reading all this talk about
how CSS will effect SEO results really SCREAMS to me my point that
designing for SEO is a flawed methodology for total success...

-- dave



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Re: [IxDA Discuss] Cramming what we do into a few hours

2008-01-04 Thread Charlie Kreitzberg
Hi Baruch:

I've been in that spot many times.

The goal as I see it is to:

1. Get them to see the value of our work
2. Don't overwhelm them with details
3. Calm their fears that this will be disruptive by explaining how
the work fits into the overall project process.

Some years ago I developed the LUCID Framework for interaction
design. I've found it to be a useful schema for presenting the work.
I'd be happy to share it and other materials I have if they would be
helpful.

Charlie


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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[IxDA Discuss] Cramming what we do into a few hours

2008-01-04 Thread Baruch Sachs
Hello everyone,

My company has given me the opportunity to teach incoming technical and
project management type folks about what it is that we do. The goal is to
help these folks understand where we come in in the overall product
development methodology.

I have about 2-3 hours to give these folks a sense of what our profession is
about, our activities and the value it adds when properly incorporated into
a project. So I am curious: given those admittedly loose parameters what
topics should I be sure to cover?

Thanks
Baruch Sachs

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Re: [IxDA Discuss] Cramming what we do into a few hours

2008-01-04 Thread Nasir Barday
I do this every 6 months for our new engineering classes. If I have
only an hour, I cover roughly what Dan outlined. If I have a second
hour, I dedicate it to something interactive. I'll start with
something small, like a group design crit of one view in an app. Then
I walk them through the process as if we were to design the thing
correctly from scratch (e.g. after a contextual inquiry, a design
research team came up with the following. Let's make somethingon the
whiteboard.)

Eventually it becomes design-by-committee and some opinion wars break
out. That's when I have people recall the last time that happened to
them, how much it sucked, and how we as IxDs/UX professionals can help
avoid them and be more effective. Below the surface, the talk is a
sales pitch for how my team can make their jobs much easier.

Oh! And depending on how set-in-their-ways/experienced your audience
is, you'll want to play up the fact that there is no right way to
implement the process, e.g. you recognize that full-blown contextual
inquiries are not always necessary or feasible, that the design
process is itself designed for each product group depending on
personalities, roles, etc.

- Nasir

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[IxDA Discuss] FW: The death of web usability testing as we know it?

2008-01-04 Thread Dante Murphy
quote
While you can use it for this, to my knowledge its main purpose is to
test campaign effectiveness. While I haven't used Offermatica in
particular, I have been involved in campaigns where we did A/B testing
with a limited audience. What we did was to test two different creative
treatments/messages. It was pretty helpful, as one message converted
significantly better than the other. When we launched the campaign
nationwide, we did so with the campaign that converted better.
Obviously. :
)

I think the key to successfully using a product like this is to use it
for something with an extremely limited scope. I'd never, EVER use it
for a whole Web site. There are just too many confounding factors in
that sort of situation that prevent a product like this from giving
actionable information. Sure, it would give you data, but any
conclusions you'd draw from that data would be basically made up. Now,
if there is a particular area of the Web site that has a particular
conversion or activity of interest, then that might be a situation in
which such a product can yield actionable information.

- Fred
/quote

When I was with GSI Commerce, we began to use Offermatica for exactly
this purpose.  At the time it could not be used to evaluate a workflow;
the architecture was that you would designate an area of a tested page
as an m-box, then put two or more variants in play and analyze their
results.  Multiple campaigns could be evaluated at a single time, but
the data became suspect if the campaigns overlapped.

One of the other shortcomings was that the page architecture had to be
consistent; only the contents of the m-box could change.  They could
be different sizes, but your layout had better accommodate that or the
whole page would get wonky (which happened a few times).

It was not by any means a way of testing experience or workflow; and
unless they have significantly improved their system architecture, it
still isn't.  All you can do is see if one way of treating one section
of one page is better than another way.  Hardly a substitute for
usability testing or good interaction design, and probably not a
particularly valuable tool.

Dante Murphy | Director of Information Architecture | D I G I T A S  H E
A L T H
229 South 18th Street | Rittenhouse Square | Philadelphia, PA 19103 |
USA
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
www.digitashealth.com  

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Re: [IxDA Discuss] Cramming what we do into a few hours

2008-01-04 Thread Billy Cox
If it were me, I would use a simulation exercise to illustrate the value of
usability...nothing too involved, but 15-20 minutes to grab their attention
and create interest in the topic.

I am reminded of a scene from 'Men in Black' in which Will Smith's character
and some military types are required to take a written exam but they are not
given a hard surface on which to write. The 'real' test is to determine
which one of them is resourceful enough to pull a nearby table over and use
it as a writing surface.

The application to usability has to do with *not* assuming that the end-user
of whatever we are designing is resourceful enough to figure out things that
are painfully obvious to us.

Another possibility... Create a timed problem-solving exercise in which
teams of 2-3 people have to figure out why a given product is selling poorly
and generating heavy customer service call volume.

Keep in mind that the audience will forget everything that you say and they
will lose, file, or throw away any paper that you put in their hands. What
they *can* keep is the idea that usability is worth paying attention to.
They could also come away with the understanding that they ignore usability
at their own peril.



Hello everyone,

My company has given me the opportunity to teach incoming technical and
project management type folks about what it is that we do. The goal is to
help these folks understand where we come in in the overall product
development methodology.

I have about 2-3 hours to give these folks a sense of what our profession is
about, our activities and the value it adds when properly incorporated into
a project. So I am curious: given those admittedly loose parameters what
topics should I be sure to cover?

Thanks
Baruch Sachs




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Re: [IxDA Discuss] SEO and Usability

2008-01-04 Thread Jeff Seager
Luis said:
'In fact, abundant use of div and span tags wouldn't be the problem
but substituting semantic markup by them: a span classed as
header2, instead of an H2 tag, for example.'

Yes, Luis, I think you've said it better than I did. That's exactly
the sort of thing I meant.

I wholeheartedly agree with Fred about structure and consistency.
Well-structured semantic markup yields huge benefits in searching as
well as presentation, and all of this relates to faster page loads,
better accessibility and a more positive user experience.


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Posted from the new ixda.org
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Re: [IxDA Discuss] Form Validation

2008-01-04 Thread Carolynn
I'm with Caroline - Mint is disturbing!

I was experimenting with error fields and after some debate decided
to do it this way (granted this form is simple, sorry about the
non-Englishness!): https://www.net-apotek.no/site/shop/register.html
... click on the 'register' button and all field labels with a
problem turn red. There's also an error message at the top of the
page for two reasons - firstly the field with an error may be below
the fold so the user misses it, and secondly for accessibility
particularly a screen reader user.

I just felt phrases like 'Name is required' are a bit pointless -
it says 'Name', people know what a name is and if you didn't
complete the field it was more likely that you missed it rather than
misunderstood. Fields that require a bit of explanation or special
requirements have the grey text under the label clarifying the info
required. There were about 2 instances where we felt a customised
error message would be better but we tried to keep things as simple
as possible which definitely helps with maintenance and translation
issues. 

There is a mistake on this page *blush* ... the asterisks next to the
email and password fields shouldn't be there, they're left over from
the previous error control method.

This site has a sister B2B site which has more complicated forms and
we'll be using this error message control style... *fingers crossed*
for the user testing!!


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Re: [IxDA Discuss] Leading websites using Web 2.0

2008-01-04 Thread James W . Bond Jr .
I am particularly fond of schematic's website

.schematic.com




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Re: [IxDA Discuss] Cramming what we do into a few hours

2008-01-04 Thread Tom Illmensee
There's a fun demonstration technique called [EMAIL PROTECTED] 

Here's the gist. You demonstrate usability techniques by running a
few quick task-based tests with volunteers from the crowd serving as
participants. The rest of the audience picks a web site and provides
the tasks. The drama unfolds as the participants do things on the
site while the audience watches everything projected on a screen.  

Paul Marty (Florida State University) and Michael Twidale (University
of Illinois) developed the technique with museum and library web sites
in mind, but it could probably be adapted for any type of site.  

I've seen them run sessions at conferences and the audience has a
blast. The volunteers do, too. 

Full paper here:
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1260/1180

Abstract: 

This article documents the authors%u2019 attempt to develop a quick,
inexpensive, and reliable method for demonstrating user testing to an
audience. The resulting method, [EMAIL PROTECTED], is simple enough to
be conducted at minimal expense, fast enough to be completed in only
thirty minutes, comprehensible enough to be presented to audiences
numbering in the hundreds, and yet sophisticated enough to produce
relevant design recommendations, thereby illustrating for the
audience the potential value of user testing in general. In this
article, the authors present their user testing demonstration method
in detail, analyze results from 44 trials of the method in practice,
and discuss lessons learned for demonstrating user testing in front
of an audience.


While I agree completely with Jakob Nielsen that user testing is
not entertainment
(http://www.useit.com/alertbox/user-testing-showbiz.html),
[EMAIL PROTECTED] seems like a fun and engaging way to introduce
usability concepts to an audience because they actively participate
in the exercise.

Plus, you can take a break from the PowerPoint deck for a little
while. 2-3 hours seems like a long time. 

Good luck!


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Re: [IxDA Discuss] Cramming what we do into a few hours

2008-01-04 Thread Charlie Kreitzberg
For those of you who requested the LUCID Framework materials, I've
put a link on my website so you can download the initial paper.

Point your browser at:

http://www.cognetics.com/lucid/index.html 

and click on the link that invites you to download the introduction.

LUCID was a framework for interaction design that I worked out with
some of my colleagues including (Whitney Quesenbery  Scott
McDaniel).

The LUCID Framework is based on six stages. I am currently working on
a new revision which is more iterative. I hope to do some of that work
collaboratively with interested colleagues as soon as I get a website
set up.

Your comments and ideas are gratefully welcomed.

I have more material -- for example PPT slides for all the stages but
didn't want to overwhelm people with too much stuff.

Tom -- I really like the usability at 90mph idea. Especially if you
get a website with real problems and some good tasks.

Charlie


The LUCID Framework is a 


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[IxDA Discuss] A question in this year's business trends

2008-01-04 Thread Lis Hubert
Hi all!

Hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season. I was looking through the
blogsphere today and happened upon an interesting article and than upon some
interesting questions. I posted these thoughts on my site as well, but I
wanted to ask the IxDA group if they had any thoughts. My post:
I read an interesting article today that was featured on the Catalyze
bloghttp://www.mycatalyze.org/Blogs/CatalyzeBlogsCurrentWisdom/tabid/1006/BlogID/28/EntryID/937/Default.aspx.
The articlehttp://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.aspx?ar=2080l2=13was
put together by the McKinsey Group, and was featured in their
quarterly
newsletter. I started to read through it, and realized that these trends
have been around for at least some time. After reading
Wikinomicshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinomics,
I thought these were already fairly well known, at a bare minimum in the web
sphere. Pardon the pun. In all seriousness, I would think that the topics
would be last year's trends to watch. So I came up with a couple of
questions? Who usually sees the bus coming first. I want to believe it's the
folks who like myself and my team keep an eye out for what's next, what
works, and how to make things work better. Also, how long does it take for
these ideas to penetrate other industries or schools of thought? Thoughts?

Happy Friday!
Lis
http://www.elisabethhubert.com

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Re: [IxDA Discuss] Leading websites using Web 2.0

2008-01-04 Thread rchoquette
That's brilliant.

Really slick, clean.  A little overwhelming, however, when you view
it from a high level  


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