Posts tagged as:

User experience

Is usability kaput?

by Bill on April 20, 2009

Whatever happened to Jakob Nielsen?

Do you remember him? Do you remember when usability and user experience were the terms of the day and we were all bound and determined to make technology, particularly Internet related technology, user-friendly? Easy to use? Easy to understand?

When was that? Late 1990’s? Early 2000’s? I’m not sure but I’m increasingly annoyed by how many of the tools we’re using now, particularly social media related tools, are utterly unaware of how people, average people, actually experience them.

For example, if you asked the average person what the # symbol is they would likely say, “The number sign,” or “The pound sign.” How many of them know that it is, as far as dictionaries go, the hash mark? Not many is my guess. Yet on Twitter people are expected to know what is meant by a hashmark. They’re also expected to know what it is used for. Or where to use it, which leads to …

Does anyone know why Twitter has a “Find People” search in its header but a completely different search in its footer (and, as far as using it goes, one on a different site entirely)? Why the Twitter logo on the main Twitter page goes to the Twitter home page but on the search page (search.twitter.com) the same logo, in the same place, goes to the main search page? (It’s on this search page that the # symbol is used.)

I recently added a plugin to my Wordpress site. Granted, the average person may not be using Wordpress (self hosted version), but still … When I go to edit it (change colours etc.) from the widgets page it goes to a site that allows me to make changes but has no save button. No, but it does have something called “TweetRoll Me.” What in the world is that supposed to mean? I think it means save, but I’m still not sure. It looks to be an attempt to be cute and clever but, if you know anything about how people experience the Internet, you know those are two things that rarely work. If it’s a save button call it save. Period. Find another place to be clever.

Do you remember when Facebook was really growing and it seemed everyone was getting on to it? If so, you may also recall how many of them were baffled by it. Does anyone yet know what “poke” was suppose to mean? Or what you were supposed to do when someone “poked” you? I have a friend who only recently got on to Facebook and she keeps telling me she doesn’t understand it, doesn’t know what to do and, “How do I find people?”

To many of her questions I shrug and say, “I dunno.”

While not deliberate, many of the latest social media applications appear to be designed by a technological oligarchy who seem to say, “It’s not for us to speak your language; it’s up to you to figure out how to speak ours.”

Every tool, every app is a learning curve of language and application. (What does this mean? What is it for?) And there is little if any awareness of how an average person might perceive it. We’re so caught up in developing and locating “the next big thing” we fail to make the first thing comprehensible.

What makes this worrying is that, just as the gap between rich and poor grows daily, the gap between those conversant with technology and those who are not also grows. (You know, those people experiencing not just real-time but the real-world.)

Maybe it’s time we slowed down and stopped putting so much emphasis on new ways to communicate and started putting some attention on how to communicate.

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You can’t break wind online

by Bill on January 14, 2009

You can’t fart online. You can’t have strong body odour like you have after jogging or working out at the gym. Not online.

Online, you can see pictures of my dog. Were I to make a video or an audio file, you might hear her bark. But you’ll never smell her dog scent or feel the firmness of the strong, young dog muscles in her shoulders and hind legs. You won’t feel the smooth coarseness of her fur that you might if you physically pet her.

She’ll never bite you online.

Farts, body odour, dog bites … None of these are things we’re in any great rush to experience, I grant you.

But despite things like Facebook hugs and smiles, you’ll never experience a real hug or kiss online. There is nothing tactile here. There are no odours. Key human senses are not experienced online. One day? Maybe. But not anytime soon.

So …

With more of our connections being made online, with more of our time spent on the web, what happens to us? How do we change? What does the absence of certain senses mean to us?

Who do we become?

Does this even matter?

Just askin’ …

(By the way … My dog, Molly Bloom, does not bite. She’s sceptical of people when she first meets them, but is friendly soon enough and very gentle. She wanted me to add this as she felt she had been slandered in this post.)

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Damn! The hoo-hah works!

by Bill on November 8, 2008

I was looking at Amazon’s newest notion, Windowshop.com, a new site for … well, window shopping online. I went there and did the usual rolling of the eyes. A lot of online flim-flam, multimedia falderal with little substance.

I get annoyed online because so many companies, certainly their marketing departments, continue to think that pretty pictures and so on, with little actual information, are better than informing the consumer and engaging in a conversation.

I still think that. I wish corporations would take a cue from successful blogs which, in most cases, depend on text and actually interacting with their visitors.

But …

While giving a few moments to Windowshop in order to see what it was, I came across the movie, on DVD, The Visitor. And now I’m going to track it down and buy it after watching the trailer.

So I guess it works. On the other hand, I live in Canada and went to Amazon.ca to see if the movie was available and what that the price might be. Well, the price is too high. I’m pretty sure I’ll find it cheaper elsewhere. I can even wait a bit and possibly get it as a previously viewed DVD at an even lower cost.

In that sense, it didn’t work. But that has little to do with the site and more to do with the pricing.

But back to Windowshop … I’m skeptical. Maybe it will catch on. But like Microsoft Office and it’s redesign that goes against what people are use to in programs like Word, which is frustrating and requires changing long established habits and demands oodles of time to figure out how to do the simplest things (and by default saving files in a format only Word 2007 can open), the Windowshop site has some curious navigation. You can get use to it pretty quickly but, as with all things Flash, it has quirks which can be annoying.

Maybe it’s me. I find Flash to be user-unfriendly. To me, Flash is pretty but clunky and slows everything down. And I’ve never understood why it’s popular.

Is that just the luddite in me?

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Writers incognito

by Bill on May 17, 2004

There are writers among us but they are sometimes not easy to recognize.

Writing, often viewed as a profession of the lower orders, traditionally pays rather poorly. In order to escape this ghetto-ish trap, a writer will often call him or her self by some other term. Currently, in my present position, I am a communications analyst.

What is the difference between a communications analyst and a writer?

A communications analyst can often be paid a good middle-manager’s salary, plus benefits. As a general rule, a writer cannot. He or she must be freelance and used sparingly, in times of crisis, and released from his or her labours as quickly as possible (in other words, when the budget is gone).

For reasons like this, writers disguise themselves. In one job, I was actually called an audio-visual operator though I don’t recall any technical responsibilities accompanying the job. But the people I worked for needed someone on staff who could write.

Unfortunately, they had to disguise me because the company did not hire writers. They preferred to go through ad agencies. This allowed them to pay three to four times as much as an in-house writer would have cost them. It also gave them leave to run about like mad headless chickens when the writing from the agency came back and … well, sucked.

(This isn’t to say ad agency writing is bad – it just costs a lot more. When the writing isn’t up to snuff the reason is because the best writers are working on the biggest, most lucrative accounts. If you’re not one of these accounts, the odds are good you’ll get someone who is just learning the ropes. But this, too, doesn’t mean the writer can’t write well. Quite often his or her poor writing isn’t poor writing but poor information. No one can write good, effective copy that meets the client’s objectives if he or she doesn’t have the right information. But that’s a topic for another day …)

Some of the other terms for writers? Well, there is the communications director or creative director. And then there’s the creative analyst. Titles, in fact, are a mix and match affair. Communications, analyst, director, manager … these are all good terms to fudge with and align in a variety of ways. The word creative use to be a good term but seems to have fallen from favour in recent years.

A good if long winded term is Director – User Experience and Communications. This suggests a toe in the field of usability and cutting edge marketing even though all you will essentially be is a writer and editor. But that’s okay. No one you’ll work with will know a damn thing about the customer experience or usability so whatever you say about it will probably fly.

Final note: though I make light of usability and customer (or user) experience as terms, they are incredibly important to success. If a writer is smart, he or she will get up to speed on these areas because they have a profound impact on what you write. Or at least they should.

But again, that’s another day’s topic.

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