Topic Archive: UXD

Icons are evil; so are menus - unless you do them right

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, November 18, 2008 @ 5:37 pm

Menus and dropdowns seem like attractive design choices because they conserve screen real estate while providing users access to a potentially large number of commands. But if you resist the easy out of menus and dropdowns, you may find that your applications become far more usable.

Survey the software you use for yourself, both browser- and desktop-based. Think about which applications provide the most invisible, effortless interfaces. I doubt it will be the ones that hide commands in complex menus and dropdown systems.

For some negative examples, let's look at Firefox and its more social cousin, Flock. Each app offers an advanced bookmark management mechanism, but the usability of that mechanism suffers in each due to over-reliance on cryptic menus.

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agile ajax

Download my album for money?

Michael Dain, Wednesday, June 25, 2008 @ 12:07 pm

As a happy transient fom the world of record stores to downloading my tunes happily from emusic, Loronix, moistworks and other fee based or file sharing sites, I am interested in how the music world is balancing art with commerce. With iTtunes being my least favorite way to get music, yet for convenience, it has surpassed 5 billion downloads, the pricing structure still seems broken. Radiohead made everyones news with releasing their record as a "how much would you like to pay" model. My problem with this was how difficult, confusing and somewhat rinky-dink the download/pay experience was handled. It actually made me not want to pay. Now comes the same idea done right - the 'mashup' artist Girl Talk, who put out one of my favorite records last year, has a pay what you like model done right.

The first page offers a clear value proposition, name your price - but if you pay 5 bucks you can get lossless versions. Pay 10 and get a 'real' cd whenever they create it. Then process the transaction using paypal, so no messy credit card transactions. Download at the same time so paying is not tied to actually getting the files (you can still bail on paying) However, being a fan I settled on $2.50, a tip so to speak. How about you, does the straightforwardness and ease of use make you want to pay at least something? Or to be profound - does ease of use translate into profits? I'm banking on yes, since the site was being hit so hard that it won't even load the cover picture, and it is my profession as well. I would love to see statistics on how this works out for Greg, but being a 'pirate' music site, we may never know what the ratio of payers to moochers is, which is a shame.

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user experience design

Goldberg workflow

Michael Dain, Friday, February 22, 2008 @ 5:11 pm

In a current project there is the need to use email to allow customers to 'sign up' for information updates. In working through the user experience I have been looking deeper into how different programs have enabled email to process and initiate workflow that it led me to solve a problem in a surprising way. It also reminded me of how in user research it can be nonsensical and even counterintuitive how people use software to help them with their tasks. Its all a strange rube goldberg like process, which gives me an excuse to share the "Pitagora switch" video, which always invigorates me when a software project seems to lose momentum.

I started with a basic problem of the customer (In this case, me) who is a amateur oenophile. I try a new wine and would like to keep track of my thoughts and rankings in the easiest way possible. I have an account on Corkd, a wine rating site, but the customer experience is lacking in some ways, and adding wines is a chore. A friend mentioned that he only buys wine based on label, and that is important, so I would like to keep a photo for reference as well. Many sites do photos, many do blogs, but I wanted to do them both together. So I set up my own site with a bit of wordpress and a domain name, I was up and running. However, it still seemed a chore, if I was enjoying a wine, I would have to go to the computer, log in, write, set up, upload photos, remember which one... oh, again, too much work, and the site and content stagnated.

Armed with some experience in the email interfaces to these blogging/cms systems, I came up with a weird way to make the process easier. It does involve an iphone, but that is just to enable the 'mobile' experience. As I went through it, it worked perfectly, and was quite a bit of fun, not to mention a triumph of non-linear thinking! To summarize:

1. Enjoy some wine - be sufficiently inspired to blog something about it
2. Use the iphone (or I suppose any picture phone) to photograph the wine label
3. Email the picture to flickr (check flickr account details for your personal email address that posts the picture)
4. Set up flickr to be aware of the 'wineskeptic' blog by pointing it to a script within wordpress that will accept XML posts
5. This enables the little 'blog this' link above the picture, using the iphone web browser enter the tasting notes. Save.
6. Check the blog, notes and picture are posted, success!

I hadn't really used the flickr service for anything but archiving and sharing photos before, and its a very cooperative model they enabled. The photo is not the main reason for the post. If you have experiences with similar ways you mashed up some technologies to solve a workflow problem, please comment!

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user experience design