Topic: User Experience Design

Are You Building an Application or an Antique Web Framework?

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, May 5, 2009 @ 5:47 pm

photo credit: dave_7

A few years ago, a friend of mine asked me to help him estimating the conversion of a client/server application to the web. He came armed with a spreadsheet of features, I came armed with Ibuprofen and a red pen.

My usual approach to estimating involves breaking down the features into things that can be implemented by a pair of developers within a two week period. I give these a complexity factor of 1-5, then run them through an empirically derived formula to come up with an estimate in terms of person-iterations. (It's actually a little more complicated than that, but this is the main effort). Getting the count and size of these mini-features right is the key aspect of this technique. His spreadsheet had almost 300 features listed, and so we settled in for a day of fun.
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Software Development

Week in Review

Dietrich Kappe, Sunday, March 15, 2009 @ 6:56 pm

Some interesting posts from around the blogosphere:

• The GWT Plugin for Grails has been stuck in version 1.4.x of GWT for forever. Michael Galping has published a two part (one and two) series at IBM Developerworks on integrating Grails and GWT 1.5.3. Extensive, well illustrated with full source code available for download.
• InfoQ has published an interesting conversation about Ajax and COMET versus HTML Web Sockets, i.e. hacky COMET versus real bi-directional communication mechanisms between the server and browser.
• UXDesign.com has a concise summary of an Alan Cooper Interview video from 2008. User Experience Design, baby!
• David Hamill has some provocative musing on the difference between usability and user experience design. Not sure I agree with everything he has to say, but it's a question that comes up often and is worth thinking about.
• A bit older, but I just came across it: the original ScrumMaster, Jeff Sutherland, has an interesting article about ROI and incremental development. The conclusion? Incremental is better. But seriously, we don't have enough rigorous thinking and writing about how good design and process reduces the cost of software in the long term (while perhaps increasing it in the short term).

These were some of the posts that I found valuable over the last week. Please share yours in the comments.

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Software Development

Receive 10% off Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks by Luke Wroblewski

Brian Dillard, Monday, December 29, 2008 @ 10:41 am

Rosenfeld Media contacted me after I published my review of Luke Wroblewski's "Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks." They offered Agile Ajax readers 10% off "Web Form Design" or any other purchase at rosenfeldmedia.com. To redeem, simply enter the code PATHFINDER at checkout.

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Software Development

Book recommendation: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks by Wroblewski

Brian Dillard, Monday, December 22, 2008 @ 4:15 pm

Usability and design guru Luke Wroblewski knows that web forms suck. More importantly, he knows why - and how to make them suck less.

For the past few years, the Yahoo! product design exec has been presenting his ongoing research into the humble HTML form at conferences and on his blog, Functioning Form. I attended Wroblewski's presentation at An Event Apart Chicago 2007 and came away super-impressed. His persuasive mixture of case studies, existing research and newly commissioned usability studies helped shed light on the patterns and anti-patterns that determine whether users successfully complete your forms or give up in disgust.

All of Wroblewski's preparation came to fruition earlier this year when he published "Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks" (Rosenfeld Media). After finally taking the time to read the book cover to cover, I'm mad at myself for waiting so long.

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Software Development

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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Software Development

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

37signals and the pain of the below-the-fold button

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, April 30, 2008 @ 3:03 pm

Google Notebook finally got a feature I've been asking for since the beginning: The ability to remember whether I want my notebooks sorted alphabetically or by date of last update. When the service launched, notebooks were always sorted by last update. When they finally added the option of alphabetical sorting, they left out the ability to make your choice sticky across sessions. This little wrinkle annoyed me almost as much as the Google Calendar search box's default action of searching public calendars rather than my own. I can't believe what a difference it makes in your relationship with a webapp when you don't curse out loud every time you use it.

Many users have the tendency to get bent out of shape about deficiencies in a tiny, tertiary portions of an application - or, for that matter, an operating system. Mac users devote entire forums to complaining about changes to, or lack of changes to, the Dock. PC users are still cursing those stupid Windows XP "You have unused icons on your desktop" messages. When we spend increasingly endless stretches of our lives in front of a terminal, tiny annoyances add up.

I call this the Disproportionately Annoying Detail Syndrome, or DADS. It has a tendency to flare up worst when you're working late on a short deadline and your computing environment fails to read your mind.

A couple of years ago, when I first started abandoning desktop software for cloud computing, I gave Ta-Da List a shot. I couldn't get over the placement of the "Add another item" command. Instead of putting it at the top of the list, they stuck it at the bottom. Every time I wanted to add a task, I had to scroll down to the bottom of the page before I could start typing. I worked with this system for about a week before jumping ship to Remember the Milk, where I can hit the "t" key to add a task without ever picking up my mouse.

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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