beatnic - just wondering

We’ve all seen it.

The dreaded “Skip Intro”.

The picture of the boss on the homepage obscuring any useful content or functionality.

I was just discussing this with a friend and came up with a new name for an old problem “Bonus-centred design”

Here’s how it works:

• Take direct orders from the boss. Do not ask questions
• Do not clarify purpose
• Remember the boss knows what good design is - it must be interactive have things you can click to make other things move around
• Do not under any circumstances talk to potential users of the site
• You only need one person to test with. The boss
• Do tell the boss how many hits the site will get. Forget about task completion
• Do your best to get a video of the boss on the homepage welcoming people to this amazing online experience
• Reinforce the design with company branding at every opportunity. The more suited to busines cards and company stationery the better
• Make it all about the company and not about the people who use your products and services
• Do not worry about accessibility. It takes time and costs money. And anyway the software supplier assures their product will have an accessibility patch very soon

I’m sure there are more…

I’ve had my Nokia N95 phone since June. I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s good for looking at websites, the camera is great despite the shutter lag, video quality good. It’s ok for having phone calls on. Battery life’s ok. I haven’t got the patience with the GPS, and sometimes I do wonder if it’s registered a key press…

There a couple of things I find virtually impossible to remember how to do…

1. Changing the “desktop icons”

   Well that’s what I call them. It’s the menu which lets you access six applications quickly from the phone’s desktop or start screen. I guess it’s because they’re called Active standby apps - not a name that I could easily have guessed.

   Here’s the path you’ll need to take to change them:

   Main Menu > Tools > Settings > General > Personalisation > Standby mode > Active Standby apps

   Phew! Now you can select which apps you want to create short-cuts for.

2. Deleting multiple text messages

   Deleting all your messages in your SMS inbox is different from previous Nokia models, which as far as I can remember had their own delete menu.

   With the N95 (and possibly across the N-series) you’ll need to use the Mark/Unmark feature.

   In your message inbox, highlight one of the text messages you want to delete, and select Options. Select Mark/Unmark then Mark all. This will be indicated on-screen by placing a tick next to each message that’s marked. You can now perform tasks on all the Marked messages, including delete.

And what’s the difference between a Tool and an Application? I’m sure there’s a logic in there somewhere, but I find it very confusing. To me they’re all tools and they’re all applications.

I was having coffee with a friend today who does work with people in countries where internet speeds are down at dial-up rates of 28.8kbps on a good day and where it is rare for workers to have their own internet connection in the office let alone at home.

I mentioned the recent post I’d written about myspace pages taking 5 minutes to load in India and Brazil.

It struck me that it would make sense for people with such low speed connections to the internet to use the mobile versions of the websites instead.

Another advantage of the mobile versions of these sites is that they cut out a lot of the clutter that you see on the normal pages because they’ve been pared down for faster download speeds for mobile devices.

Try these out for size:

• Flickr mobile site (yes, photos not best for low bandwidth I guess)
• Yahoo
• BBC News
• BBC homepage
• National Rail enquiries (UK)
• eBay (UK)

The following appear to intercept my browser request, notice I’m not on a mobile, and serve me the standard versions. Maybe there’s a way round this.

• m.facebook.com
• m.google.com

Facebook seems to be becoming a necessary evil.

I’ve never felt particularly comfortable about it, but I do have an account and I do use it from time to time.

Somewhat worryingly found out today (thanks Chris T) that unless you change your privacy settings anyone in your network can see all your information as well as your “friends”.

This means that until I went in to “Privacy” and then “Edit settings” under Profile and selected “Only my friends” from the dropdown list, my fellow one million London network members could see everything about me!.

Fellow Facebook dabblers may wish to change their settings too.

I’m now wondering what else I don’t know about Facebook… like can I trust the “apps” that I occasionally add to my profile?

Count your opinions

Originally uploaded by Beatnic.

So I thought I’d add my input to the survey being run by London Underground on personal safety at Elephant & Castle tube station.

Unfortunately I didn’t understand how to use this “Opinionmeter” until I’d already started using it - at which point I had already mistakenly answered the first question.

I think the reason I got it wrong is because I expected it to be like a cashpoint (ATM), where the instructional text would appear on the little screen above the numeric keypad.

Only in this case the questions and instructional text are on the poster above the machine.

Being my usual self and therefore not reading the instructions I pressed the “1″ button, because that’s what it said on the screen.

A quick fix would be to have an highly visible label on the Opinionmeter itself pointing me towards the text above.

I really don’t understand the purpose of the screen at all.

I wonder how many other people this has happened to.

Better still, why not build it in to my ticket machine / Oyster top-up experience? Anonymity guaranteed of course.

Don’t be put off by the name!

If you’re interested in anything vaguely related to technology there’s something to listen to here.

I finally started catching up with some of my blog, news and podcast subscriptions recently and that coincided well with the arrival of my Nokia N95.

Some podcast stuff I’ve been listening to and would recommend includes:

• Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake telling the story of how Flickr started life as part of a massively multiplayer online game by Ludicorp and wound up becoming the darlings of the Web 2.0 world and getting bought by Yahoo! where she is now scattering the seeds of design thinking in everything there.
• Ideo boss Tim Brown talks in threes about design thinking - inspiration, ideation and implementation - and how it’s being picked up by big business.
• Irene Au, director of user experience at Google. On setting up a central user experience department, not biting off more than you can chew, and hiring T-shaped people.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… Netvibes is quite simply everything an intranet (homepage) needs to be.

As well as being a great way of managing all my stuff on the internet of course.

Every now and then I read something that seems to coincide with my life so perfectly I imagine there must be an Amélie-like character who has placed it in my path.

This is certainly true of John Maeda’s book The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life).

Maeda is a world-renowned graphic designer, visual artist and computer scientist at the MIT Media Lab.

At work we have a big simplicity theme going on at the moment which I’m closely involved in. The book is the perfect reference for this work.

On a personal note I found it covers themes which are incredibly important to me in the way I work and think as a technologist, designer and facilitator and also in my non-work life.

There are ten laws. If you’re really pushed for time the tenth law “The One” summarises them all:

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.

The book is deliberately 100 pages long. Just knowing that when you’re reading it is reassuring and offers a feeling of simplicity in itself.

I must admit I enjoyed the book so much I broke the third law immediately by taking my time to ponder the content.

There’s a great explanation of how the iPod became more complex before it became simpler, like so many other things in life!

Maeda also covers Gestalt, one of my favourite subjects, and how it helps when designing and understanding design.

If you don’t want to buy the book, much of the information in the book is available on Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity blog, though I find the fact that the book packages the ideas and is itself simply designed means it works much better for me.

The nutshell: buying rail tickets online still isn’t very joined up.

TTL: “Thank you for calling thetrainline.com how can I help?”

Me: “Hello, I accidentally managed to book myself two tickets using the website. Can you tell me how I can cancel one of them please?”

[brief exchange of reference numbers and identification information]

TTL: “Hello Mr Price. There will be a £10 charge for cancelling your ticket, because you booked two ticket.

Me: “But I only wanted one ticket, but the website let me buy two. There was no confirmation message or email, so I assumed the transaction hadn’t been completed. So I clicked the “Buy ticket” button again because it hadn’t worked the first time…”

TTL: “If you want to cancel one of your tickets there is a £10 charge.”

Me: “That’s not good enough.”

I’m not a frequent train traveller, and have rarely used online booking for my tickets, unlike flying where I can’t remember the last time I didn’t use a website to book.

That’s not to say I don’t use the online timetables to check journey details, it’s just the buying I leave to the last minute at the ticket office or self-service machines at the railway station.

So the other day I needed to check out journey details for a journey from a small station in Yorkshire to London returning a couple of days later. My incentive for checking was not only to know what my journey options were, but also the potential of an advance booking discount.

Imagine how stupid I felt when I managed to accidentally buy two tickets for myself because the website let me click the “Submit” button twice! I can’t believe a site as high-profile as thetrainline.com still hasn’t cracked this.

Just read this brilliant and incredibly timely (for me anyway!) post from the always passionate Kathy Sierra.

To avoid the Zone of Mediocrity, you must suspend disbelief.

You must be willing and able to turn off (temporarily) The Voice inside that says, “We’ll never get away with this. People will hate it.” That doesn’t necessarily mean The Voice is wrong, but until you can shut if off, you’re virtually guaranteed to stay with safer, incremental ideas. But remember–”safer” really isn’t safer anymore, unless you’re looking only to avoid criticism. Safe will keep you safely out of the spotlight. If that’s what you want (and sometimes that’s the best approach), then fine. But if not…

(side note: this is somewhat like The Inner Game approach or Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain or any of the other approaches to creativity that get your logical “talking” mind out of the way so all the more useful but non-speaking parts of your brain can get on with the important things you’re trying to accomplish.)

And it’s not just suspending disbelief about what users (or critics) will say… you must also suspend disbelief about what your company will let you do. I first experienced this at Sun, where it was almost impossible to creatively brainstorm about ways to improve things without someone jumping in with, “Yeah, but they’d never let us do that.” End of discussion. End of chance to do something amazing. Every time I do an internal workshop, the partipants are far more negative than when some of those same people are in a public version of my passionate users workshop. By taking them outside their company and having them brainstorm or work on fictional or other people’s projects, their minds are free to move about. I’ve nearly quit doing in-house workshops because the “they’ll never let us do that” syndrome is so strong.

You can’t help users kick ass until your employer lets YOU kick ass.

[Source: Creating Passionate Users: Dilbert and the zone of mediocrity]

It reminded me of the city of Mediocritaxa - well worth a visit.

Apparently junk mail subsidises the cost of sending a bona fide letter, the price we have to pay, like Google Ads for snail mail (though less intelligently targetted of course).

Every week I receive an inordinate amount of junk mail offering discounts, credit cards with huge credit limits, loans - presumably to pay back the credit cards - claiming I’ve won £1million in a competition - presumably to pay back the loan - or asking me to donate to charity.

It’s bad enough that it’s a waste of paper and other resources.

But the thing that really makes me think about never being a customer to one of these companies is the fact that I can’t just throw the thing in the paper recycling bin.

No, first I have to check it thoroughly and tear out and shred any sections which might contain part of my identity.

So please… Sky, BT, Capital One, Lloyds, Barclaycard… to name but a few… stop wasting my time!

My train to Leeds left five minutes early from Long Preston station a couple of weeks ago.

I was lucky, I turned up ten minutes early, so had a five minute wait.

But it must have really annoyed the rail replacement service passengers who were delivered by bus two minutes later thinking they had three minutes to spare.

Thank goodness my family had seen me off on foot were able to let them know so the bus driver could whisk them off to meet the train at Skipton.

Long Preston station has no attendant and no clocks.

When I asked the guard what time we were supposed to have left Long Preston he freely admitted we’d left early. He told me how they get a lot of complaints for running behind time.

I said they’d get a lot more complaints if all the trains were early than if they were late.

It’s an aura thing.

Internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye, a study shows.

Researchers [from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada] found that the brain makes decisions in just a twentieth of a second of viewing a webpage.

They were surprised as they believed it would take at least 10 times longer to form an opinion.

[...]

The researchers also believe that these quickly-formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the “halo effect”.

If people believe a website looks good, then this positive quality will spread to other areas, such as the website’s content.

Since people like to be right, they will continue to use the website that made a good first impression, as this will further confirm that their initial decision was a good one.

Full article on BBC News.

When it’s of an illustration according to Flickr.

Monkstyle.net who’s been posting illustrations to Flickr says:

I noticed a while ago that when I searched for photos using tags on flickr, that my photos weren’t showing. After checking through the Flickr faqs I discovered that this is because I have been marked as ‘NIPSA’ [Not in Public Site Areas] which means that my account is more or less hidden to people searching flickr for photos.

Flickr told him:

Flickr is a photo-sharing website, so uploading non-photos will flag your account as NIPSA.

So if you take a photo of your illustration and upload that will you be NIPSAd?

Anyway, it tarnishes Flickr’s warm and friendly user experience in my opinion.

Via Boing Boing

If there are showstoppers ask them upfront!

Don’t let me spend 10 minutes filling in personal details about myself and my other half only to be told that you can’t offer me a quote because of my other half’s profession.

I was just trying to get a quote on behalf of a friend who was on the other end of the phone at a car supermarket in London, where there are computers but you can only use their website - hmm, they’re definitely missing a trick there!

In this case Sainsbury’s Insurance is the culprit, but I’m sure they’re not alone.

Hello

I received a letter and voucher ‘wooing’ me back to [Insert company name]. Decided to have a go and the following happened:

1. Tried to key in voucher code when section came up in checkout procedure but was told I needed to book a delivery time first
2. Dutifully continued, booked delivery time and proceeded smoothly to checkout and payment but at no point was I offered another chance to key in my voucher for 10% off
3. Called the helpline number on the voucher - 0845 xxx xxx but not a recognised number
4. Looked on website to find that the number has been incorrectly printed
5. Called the correct number to find that there was a waiting time of 20 minutes . . . longer than it took me to do my shop!
6. Went red in the face and decided to send stroppy email

Please can you address this for me.

My order number is [Insert order no.]
My voucher code is [Insert voucher code]

Not feeling very wooed.

[Insert your name here]

PS When I used [Insert company name] previously I never had any real problems. I only stopped because of a change of lifestyle not because I’d encountered any real difficulties. It seems ironic that now I am trying it again because it’s convienient and have had a million and one mailings with vouchers and ‘loving’ postcards about wanting me back, have we done anything wrong? etc. (quite a cute marketing campaign but totally lost it’s appeal by the end of this experience) I end up feeling let down and frustrated - probably all the more so because of all the promises and gush . . . Sort it out!

Sent by a very good friend of mine to Ocado.

The funny thing is the actual online shopping part was pretty painless, but unfortunately for Ocado the overall experience was negative and has put a big dent in their carefully crafted brand.

Here’s something to mark World Usability Day.

Boots does a thing called Meal Deal which means for a fixed price you can get a sandwich, drink and snack/dessert.

There are two types of meal deal, one where the products are marked with a red circle and the slightly more expensive option which uses a green circle.

So you might expect the contents of this picture form a green meal deal, right?

Wrong :(

Move a little closer and you’ll see the green circle on the fruit ins’t a “Meal deal” green circle but a “Try me” green circle, with very small print saying “cannot be purchased as part of a green meal deal.”

I wonder if the packaging and labelling designers realised how much trouble they’d be causing by letting a bit of confusing information design through?

Yesterday I witnessed a 10 minute delay in a queue in a Boots store cause as a direct result of this. I wonder how many other times that’s happened.

Gestalt, not.

Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future.

In his latest alertbox, Jakob Nielsen explains how the concept of what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) is no longer useful or valid and is evolving into what-you-get-is-what-you-see (WYGIWYS) or “results-oriented UI [user interface].”

He uses the user interface redesign for Microsoft’s Office 12 as an example of where this is happening. There’s been positive feedback in initial testing apparently.

You select from a range of examples roughly what you want your end result to be (letter, book, presentation) and then narrow down to more detailed options.

And rather than drilling down through drop-down lists, your options are presented to you in context (according to the task you’re aiming to complete) and visually.

I guess this works in office-type applications because it lets people focus on the content rather than the formatting.

But I don’t think it’s new, just new to office-type applications. Other software has been based on this concept for a while now.

And there are lots of online products and services offering this kind of contextualised option selection and refinement, first thanks to Flash and now with ajax it’s spreading like wildfire.

Isn’t results-oriented UI just user-centred design by another name?

3 things that cross over between my work and my life:

• A desire to understand how things work. (What goes on under the bonnet? What do they feel like to use? What’s the story behind the design?)
• Using technology to help connect people with each other and with information
• My love of language(s)

Not to be confused with “work-life balance”.

After completing online transactions I often find myself in a cul-de-sac.

There are some notable exceptions, but most sites I’ve used are missing a trick. Often the only options are to return to a previous page or close the window housing the application.

This has always struck me as an ideal moment to let me know what else is available.

Most importantly, tell me I’ve successfully completed the transaction. If it’s repeatable allow me to do it again from here.

Having taken care of that, why not take advantage of that “what next?” moment?

What else is there I might want to do here? I’m not talking cynical marketing ploys here but something that might be genuinely useful to me and enhance my overall experience.

This must be especially important as we move to using smaller handheld devices to access the internet where typing in search terms or web addresses is still very cumbersome.

Offer a couple of (ideally contextually related) interesting choices.

Keep it simple, snappy and easy to follow through.

Yes, but how did I get here?

Yesterday I went to the Design Museum in London with some friends from work to see the design of information exhibition “YOU ARE HERE” (now in its last week).

It was full of amazing examples of how we convey complex information through models, signs and symbols, including navigation devices, orreries, maps, graphs, charts and timepieces. There were some interesting comparisons between how information is conveyed in different cultures.

But I felt it missed a trick by only showing the end results.

What I’d really like to learn is…

• Who was involved (not just the accredited designer)?
• What was discarded along the way?
• What was discovered along the way?
• What do the designs that nearly made it look like?
• How was the end result decided on and who by?
• What’s the story behind the design?

Adaptonyms (also known as textonyms and cellodromes) are words that can be typed with the same sequence of keys on a cell phone using predictive text. For example the sequence “2-3-3″ can produce “bed”, “add”, or “bee”.

Source: Wikipedia

Yesterday I texted a friend to let him know we’d “good to pub”. What I meant to write was “gone to pub”. Anyway he got the idea!

It got us talking about the perils of predictive text.

One friend pointed out that when you want to write “Mum”, the phone insists on offering “Nun” first, even though it’s much less commonly used and comes later in the alphabet. “Book” being offered before “Cool” is perhaps more understandable, but not when you think about which age group does the most texting.

The other day I got a puncture on my way in to work and wanted to text ahead to warn people I’d be late. “Got puncture in Canceryell” (hello, I’m trying to write Camberwell, what on earth is this word?)

Andy becomes body… there are loads of examples. Fortunately I don’t think I’ve offended anyone yet but I can see how it could happen.

And even though I must have written my name hundreds of times my phone never learns to offer it first. When I tap 642 I want Nic not Mic.

This week a hugely important UN-backed report, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was published about how rapidly we’re destroying our planet.

It’s four main findings are:

• Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively in the last 50 years than in any other period. This was done largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. More land was converted to agriculture since 1945 than in the 18th and 19th centuries combined. More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, first made in 1913, ever used on the planet has been used since 1985. Experts say that this resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in diversity of life on Earth, with some 10 to 30 percent of the mammal, bird and amphibian species currently threatened with extinction.
• Ecosystem changes that have contributed substantial net gains in human well-being and economic development have been achieved at growing costs in the form of degradation of other services. Only four ecosystem services have been enhanced in the last 50 years: increases in crop, livestock and aquaculture production, and increased carbon sequestration for global climate regulation. Two services – capture fisheries and fresh water – are now well beyond levels that can sustain current, much less future, demands. Experts say that these problems will substantially diminish the benefits for future generations.
• The degradation of ecosystem services could grow significantly worse during the first half of this century and is a barrier to achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals. In all the four plausible futures explored by the scientists, they project progress in eliminating hunger, but at far slower rates than needed to halve number of people suffering from hunger by 2015. Experts warn that changes in ecosystems such as deforestation influence the abundance of human pathogens such as malaria and cholera, as well as the risk of emergence of new diseases. Malaria, for example, accounts for 11 percent of the disease burden in Africa and had it been eliminated 35 years ago, the continent’s gross domestic product would have increased by $100 billion.
• The challenge of reversing the degradation of ecosystems while meeting increasing demands can be met under some scenarios involving significant policy and institutional changes. However, these changes will be large and are not currently under way. The report mentions options that exist to conserve or enhance ecosystem services that reduce negative trade-offs or that will positively impact other services. Protection of natural forests, for example, not only conserves wildlife but also supplies fresh water and reduces carbon emissions.

“The over-riding conclusion of this assessment is that it lies within the power of human societies to ease the strains we are putting on the nature services of the planet, while continuing to use them to bring better living standards to all,” said the MA board of directors [...]

Worrying stuff, but we can do something about it.

It reminded me of a book called Change the World for a Fiver by the We Are What We Do movement. I like the way the graphic design in the book makes me stop and ponder the messages for longer than I might do otherwise.

If you want to know more, have a look at the We Are What We Do website

Why not buy the book right now (or buy several and give them to your friends)?

To design is to plan, to order, to relate, and to control. In short, it opposes all means of disorder and accident.

Emil Ruder
Typography

See entry about Emil Ruder in German Wikipedia

Chatting to my friend Claire earlier about having cleared my inbox thanks to Mark Hurst’s very handy guide to Managing incoming email.

We talked about how, because of the tools we’ve been given to deal with our information, we’ve been encouraged to organise our information in hierarchical structures.

A few years ago I built a directory structure in Outlook that I thought reflected my working life. First under the headings “Me”, “My work” and “My team”, and then further sub-divided “My work” in to all sorts of folders to do with the various projects I’m overseeing or inolved in as well as the operational elements and so on.

For me this no longer works.

Now I’m so used to tagging in Flickr and labelling in Gmail etc., I want to be able to apply the same approach to my work information.