Call of Duty 4 (Computer game):

It seems that the grainy monochrome footage is easy to mimic on an Xbox 360 or PS3. The first time I saw footage like this was on CNN during the first Gulf war. It was horrible. Today, most kids will associate footage like this with harmless play, massively dissociated from reality. I really recommend taking a look at both videos – the similarities are staggering.

Real life:

What you may not know is that modified Xbox 360 controllers are used to control millitary hardware in real life. This isn’t “new” news – wired ran an article on it back in 2008. Around that time, the British army ran an TV Ad that showed a soldier controlling a UAV (Unmanned Air Vehicle) using a modified Xbox 360 Controller.

Still from British Army TV ad

The army later confirmed that this was indeed real hardware, though, somewhat amusingly, were quick to point out that they had removed the Microsoft branding. There are some more examples of game console controlers used in the military here, here and here.

A spokesperson from Rayethon (An American defence system manufacturer – who make cruise missiles among other things) was quoted here as saying “We feel we have to take advantage of the fact that all the kids are growing up with video games”. In the same article, another system vendor was quoted as proudly stating “If you can use an Xbox, you can use this”.

I can’t imagine the games console designers being happy about their work being used in military applications. Still, there’s not much they can do about it. If it’s an effective control device that requires minimal training then it’s inevitably going to get appropriated.

More Xbox controllers in the millitary. Image credit: Popular Mechanics

Through the history of humanity, boys have played with toy spears and swords – I suppose this is just a natural continuation, and nothing out of the ordinary. What’s weird is that now, for the first time, technology has advanced to the point that allows us to design weapons of war that are almost indistinguishable in use from children’s toys. Stranger than fiction.

“[...] the placebo response is highly sensitive to cultural differences. Anthropologist Daniel Moerman found that Germans are high placebo reactors in trials of ulcer drugs but low in trials of drugs for hypertension—an undertreated condition in Germany, where many people pop pills for herzinsuffizienz, or low blood pressure. Moreover, a pill’s shape, size, branding, and price all influence its effects on the body. Soothing blue capsules make more effective tranquilizers than angry red ones, except among Italian men, for whom the color blue is associated with their national soccer team [...]“

Sadly, the information in the above box is presented, in typical wired.com style, without reference to any actual research. If you want to read more, you may want to check out Meaning, Medicine and the ‘Placebo Effect’, a book written by Daniel Moreman (the anthropologist mentioned in the quote).

→ Found via Hacker News.

Spurred on by his immense success in the computing industry with the ZX80, ZX81 and ZX spectrum, Clive Sinclair set his mind to electric vehicles. He drew up the Sinclair C5. Everything looked perfect on paper. The C5 was electric and complemented by pedal power, making it a low pollution vehicle, narrow enough to drive between cars in heavy traffic, like a bicycle.

To cut a long story short, Clive Sinclair woefully overestimated his ability to transfer his successes from the familiar computing industry to the completely unfamiliar electric vehicle industry. His assumptions about market needs were way out, and the practicalities of using a C5 in real life were far removed from the intended experience on the drawing board.

Being low on the road, C5s were hard to see from cars and were dangerous, exposing the rider to unpleasant exhaust fumes. In the UK, rain and wind made them horrible to use in the long winters (not to mention dorky looking!). The C5 had no gears and the seat was not adjustable, making it uncomfortable to use if you were particularly tall or short. The motor turned out to be under-specced, making it too weak to power the rider up many hills without pedal assistance. And instead of a steering wheel or handlebars, steering was controlled by small handles on either side of the driver’s waist, making first time usage awkward and ungainly.

The lesson here is that if Sinclair had conducted field trials prior to launch, most of these problems could probably have been overcome. At the very least, he could have discovered the product was going to be a flop at an early stage, and avoiding the need to haemorrhage vast sums of cash. In 1983, Clive Sinclair raised £12 million to finance Sinclair Vehicles. By 1985, they went into receivership, having only sold 12,000 C5s.

Hold this story close to your heart. Whenever you find yourself getting carried away with an idea in an unfamiliar domain, always ask yourself “Am I doing a C5 here?” After all, it’s easy to find out. A bit of contextual field research will set you straight.

Want to know more? Read the first two chapters of The Sinclair Story by Rodney Doyle (1985).

It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You’d think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn’t sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they’re expressionists. It’s all evasion. Underneath the long words or the “expressive” brush strokes, there is not much going on, and that’s frightening.

When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

From Paul Graham’s article Taste For Makers (Feb 2002). Paul Graham is one of the partners at Y Combinator.

In the past year I’ve written almost 100 posts on 90percentofeverything.com, and received over 400 comments. If there’s one thing that’s really motivated me to carry on doing this is the great comment ratio, so I owe you all a huge thanks for that! Even if you haven’t been commenting, I’ve been aware of your presence and that’s been a big boost too – this year the site’s had an average of 7,750 unique visitors a month, and roughly 3,500 RSS subscribers. Not bad for a niche interest blog which I write in the mornings before work!

So, here’s my list of top posts of 2009, based a rough combination of analytics data, comments and retweets:

1. Signup forms must die – here’s how we killed ours!
2. User experience research skirmishes – are you guilty?
3. Five UX antipatterns to avoid when designing Log-in & Registration areas
4. What You Need To Know About Eye Tracking
5. Screening out liars from your user research
6. “Just add an egg” – Usability, User Experience and Dramaturgy
7. Achieving adoption of a disruptive product
8. No rest for the wicked: a UX designer’s job is never done
9. The importance of setting accurate expectations
10. A quick UI review of browser malware warning pages
11. Bruce Archer, Hospital Equipment and the Origins of Design Research
12. Why conversion rate uplift percentages can be confusing
13. Cheap and Free Alternatives to Morae: Usability Testing Software
14. ROI is not just for businesses: how users make ROI judgements
15. The tricks that supermarkets play to stop you from comparing on price

If that doesn’t satisfy your desire for UX articles, check out the full list of all the posts I’ve ever written on 90percentofeverything.com (all the way back to 2005, yikes!). If that’s still not enough, why not subscribe to my new linkblog at 90poe.com.

I admit that Google’s new “fade in” feature is pleasant in a bland sort of way, and seems to be a good move from a branding point of view – but what interests me is that they claim their Multivariate testing research has actually shown measurable improvements in user behaviour “efficiency” over the old UI. It’s not entirely clear what they mean by efficiency, but this seems to be rather questionable. How is this going to improve my time-to-action if I want to check my gmail? How will it help me if I want to view maps, news, or visit any of the items that are initially hidden? By “efficiency” do they mean “time to start a search” at the expense of other actions? I can’t help wondering whether this is simply a move to enhance branding that’s been dressed up as the output of behavioural research. To look at it another way, perhaps this is actually evidence that the old school “data driven decision” mindset is starting to change at Google?

To quote Marissa Mayer on the official Google blog (emphasis added):

[...] in the end, the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.

If you like this article, why not subscribe to my linkblog over on 90poe.com?

When a barrier is placed between a person and their desires, those desires become intensified. This is because the barrier prevents them from experiencing their desires in the flesh – warts and all – and instead causes them to long for their fantasy of the desired object, rather than the object itself. Fantasies are more alluring because we gloss over the bad bits, and generally the desired object takes on a mystical perfection.

This is known as the Romeo and Juliet effect. I think everyone’s familiar with the idea of it applying in romance between people, but it’s actually a useful concept to extend to design.

When creating something, it’s easy to fall in love with your ideas while they are at a nascent, intangible stage. Potential and promise are a heady mix, and it’s easy to hang around at this early stage far longer than you should do. You end up having meetings where you and your stakeholders add more and more layers onto the concept. And why not? In fantasy land, everything’s possible. Criticisms can be dodged with a swift verbal replies. Ideas are bullet proof, shape-shifting, teflon-covered wonderments.

Everything’s peachy except for one thing: it’s all bullshit.

Iterative, low fidelity prototyping is the perfect remedy, which is exactly why it’s so popular these days. You make your ideas real early on, so you can reveal the warts and deal with them as soon as possible.

The thing is, even though you may be doing your best with your lo-fi prototypes, are you revealing all the warts you should be? Are you using Lorem Ipsum when you should be giving your best shot at copywriting? Are you just designing the “happy path” through your system and forgetting about all the crucially important error conditions and error messages? In other words, even though you’re doing all the “right” things by prototyping and iterating, are you still leaving out too much detail and falling foul of the Romeo and Juliet effect?

It’s great to start off with sketches, and to build sketchy wireframes at the beginning of a project. But don’t stay in that phase. Whatever you leave out, you leave to chance.

Anyway, I’d just like to assure you that this blog is still very much alive, but I plan to write fewer, more considered articles on it. I’m separating out my short linky posts onto a separate linkblog at 90poe.com and also tweeting them on @90poe. It’s intended to be the “baby brother” of 90percentofeverything.com.

If you’re already following me on Google Reader then you’re getting this content already – I just wanted to open it up to everyone else.

Many thanks for continuing to be a reader and commenter!

This sketchy Axure widget library by Kevin Wick gets around the problem by giving your your prototypes a rough hand-drawn look.

You can see the full widget library here (You’ll need to install Scoder hand font for it to look right).

I’ve always liked this story about Betty Crocker and how General Mills took such care in designing the experience of making a cake. They’d been espousing speed and ease in the kitchen since 1931 with products like Bisquick, but this story originates from a cake mix they launched in 1952, almost 2 decades later.

To quote from Finding Betty Crocker by Susan Marks:

“At this time, the company was still refining their approach to marketing. While they sought to promote a quick and easy product that still retained a “fresh, ‘home-made’” quality, ‘the market was slow to mature’ (p. 168). The company called upon the market research of Dr. Burleigh Gardner and Dr. Ernet Dichter, both business psychologists:

‘The problem, according to psychologists, was eggs. Dichter, in particular, believed that powdered eggs, often used in cake mixes, should be left out, so women could add a few fresh eggs into the batter, giving them a sense of creative contribution.’

As a result, General Mills (who own Betty Crocker) altered their product, abandoning the powdered egg in their mixes. The requirement to add eggs at home was marketed as a benefit, conferring the quality of ‘home-made’ authenticity upon the box cake mix. (Whether using fresh eggs instead of powdered eggs actually enhanced taste was beside the point.)”

I like this story because it nicely sums up the progression in thinking from ‘just designing for ease and speed’ (old-school usability) to ‘designing an entire experience’ (new-school experience design).

Old-school Usability espouses the idea that user activities are onerous tasks that they want to get out of the way as soon as possible. While this is true in some cases, usability is now widely understood to be more of a hygiene factor – something that can cause dissatisfaction if missing, but its presence cannot take you beyond lack of dissatisfaction.

Image credit: Jonny Baker

By now you’re probably thinking “Yeah, I get it already – usability is just one of the components of good design”. So let’s move on to my second point. In the Betty Crocker example, the psychologists realized the customer wanted to play the role of a successful home-maker and cook. We could even go so far to argue that their customers may have felt societal pressures to perform this role well. The egg, therefore, becomes more than an ingredient, and more than just an extra pleasurable step. It becomes a prop, enabling the customer to play a social role. Goffman’s theory of Dramaturgy explains this to some extent. It’s worth reading about if you don’t have much background in Social Psychology or Sociology.

Now, I’m not saying that knowing a bit of sociology is going to make you into a great designer. However, it does give you a nice underpinning perspective for when you carry out field research.

Here’s a quick walkthrough the product:

Above you can see the wireframing/prototyping tool. It’s pretty much as you’d expect if you’ve ever used Axure, Protoshare or any of the other similar tools out there at the moment (there were at least 32 last time I checked).

When you view your prototype, you can view it with either a low-fi (hand sketched) or hi-fi skin. Above you can see the low-fi skin. All of the form fields are interactive.

And here’s the hi-fi skin.

You invite participants by sending them an email containing a unique URL. When they click through, they are taken to the page shown above. Pidoco° has a built in VOIP tool (much like Skype), or you can fall back on good old-fashionned telephones. Then you simply run the usability test over the web, much like you would in a face-to-face session. While you are interviewing them, the session is streamed to your web browser. Obviously it’s not going to feel as intimate and easy as a face-to-face test, but it’s far cheaper, particularly when you are testing people spread over large geographic distances.

This is the participant’s screen during a test. The narrow grey bar along the top is inserted over the prototype. The entire session is recorded in the same way as any other screen recording tool (e.g. jing, camtasia, etc), and it includes the VOIP audio. The footage is saved online for you, within your (secure) Pidoco° account area.

Bargain hunters among you may be thinking “I could do all of that using free tools instead of Pidoco!” – This is completely true. You could, for example, use yuuguu for the screensharing (free), hotgloo (still in free beta) for the prototyping and camstudio (free) for the screen recording. However, if you cobble together your own assortment of tools, you wont get the tightly integrated workflow process that Pidoco° offers. For example, on Pidoco°, moving from prototyping to a user test only requires one click. Plus, you can edit a live prototype during a user test, which is trivially easy. It’s these little details that promise to make Pidoco° different to the masses of other prototyping tools on the market today.

Disclosure: I received no incentive for this review (not even a cup of coffee). However, Pidoco° was one of the sponsors of UX Brighton Remote 360, an event I helped organize. UX Brighton is a free event, and sponsorship covers the cost of venue hire and refreshments for the attendees.

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have
plenty of messenger boys.” – Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878

“This telephone has too many shortcomings to be considered as a means of communication. The device is of inherently no value to us.” – Western Union internal memo, 1876

“Getting a new idea adopted, even when it has obvious advantages, is often very difficult.” – Rogers, 1962

Adoption of technology by end users is key to its success – even the most brilliant innovation is worth nothing if it doesn’t get used. Many technologies suffer from delays in achieving adoption. For example, voicemail was reported to have taken roughly 10 years to achieve widespread adoption [1], while the fax machine took roughly 50 years [2]. This shows that it is not just quality or usefulness that determines successful adoption: there are other factors at work.

Back in the late 1800s, the telephone met considerable resistance – people just didn’t get it. Bell actually tried to sell the patent to Western Union and to the British Post Office, but neither were in the slightest bit interested. The chief engineer at the British Post Office famously replied that they didn’t need it because “We have plenty of messenger boys.” [3]. This shortsightedness was the best thing that could have happened to Bell – today, the patent is regarded by some as one of the most profitable patents ever created [4].

Once Bell decided to start a telecoms business, the tricky business of adoption had to be dealt with. Bell knew that the benefits of the telephone were undeniable once experienced in the real world, or once you saw others like you experiencing it (aka observational learning). So, Bell Co. put telephones in hotel rooms for calling the front desk, in offices as a replacement to intercoms, and near lunch counters in diners and lunch rooms – “…that way, it reasoned, people who didn’t know how to use them would be likely to see people who did know how and in this way learn about the phone system.” [5]

By positioning telephones by lunch counters, Bell Co. are likely to have considered the public availability of the telephone usage, the highly concentrated flow of people past the telephone as they queued to buy their food, and the stage-like nature of this arrangement. They also indirectly chose a time for the interaction – lunch break, when many people have time to kill. Pretty clever when you think about it. Plus, the idea of replacing office intercoms with telephones was inspired. Intercoms were already used widely – by swapping in a telephone, this familiarized people with phones, using a known, comfortable context. Intercom-style usage is very limited (single point to single point, with no network), but it served well as a “foot in the door” to capture the attention of potential users.

What does all this mean for you – the designers of tomorrow’s products? Well, one thing’s for sure. Designing your product is only half the battle. If your product really is as disruptive as you think it is, you have to design a strategy for adoption.

References:
[1] Fancik, E., Rudman, S. E., Cooper, D., & Levine, S. (1991). Putting innovation to work: adoption strategies for multimedia communication systems Commun. ACM 34 (12), 52-63.
[2] O’Brien, L. (1989). Will the fax boom go bust? Telephony, 217(14), 38-46.
[3] Cosier, G., & Hughes, P. M. (2001). The Problem with Disruption. BT Technology, 19(4), 9.
[4] The Telephone Patent Follies on telecomhistory.org
[5] Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The Social Life of Information. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School; New York : McGraw-Hill.
Image credit: Early Bell telephone and terminal panel, 1877. The Science Museum

The Bell Co. telephone adoption story can be found in The Social Life of Information by John Seely-Brown and Paul Duguid. Many thanks to Aaron Cheang who reminded me of this story while we were chatting about Google Wave.

This is going to be something special. Abtests.com is created by Bokardo, Performable, and KISSmetrics. In their words: “Our goal is simple: to help people test their web sites/applications and share that knowledge with others, making everyone smarter in the process.”

The site uses a well considered and concise format for the articles, making it really easy to read. I think it’s still in Beta, but it looks almost ready to me. Follow @abtests to find out more.

This post is all about the importance setting accurate expectations. One of my friends, Ofer Deshe, often uses this clip when running UX training workshops. What a great way of summing it up!

If you lead your consumers to expect one thing but then give them a poorer substitute, they will be disappointed – angry even (but hopefully not machine-gun angry like Michael Douglas in Falling Down). Honesty is the best option. If your credit card application process takes 15 minutes to complete, then just tell them. Don’t say it takes 5. Lets look at a real world example. Geni.com is often cited as providing a great sign-up experience, but the example below example shows it in a different light.

Above you can see a screengrab from a recent geni.com email campaign. “Discover new relatives with Geni hot matches” – sounds pretty cool. Let’s see what happens when you click through.

After you’ve taken the trouble to log-in, you end up on this page. This is pretty tantalising – it’s possible that within a few seconds you’ll see entire new branches of your family tree, perhaps even new lines of ancestry. You’d be foolish not proceed by clicking on one of the “similar profile” links.

What’s this? Most of the information here seems redundant – but hang on, it’s mentioning words like “Pro”, “Special Offer” and “Try for free”. That doesn’t sound good. Let’s see what happens when we click “Try Geni Pro”

A collective scream of frustration “Argh! A credit card form! And it wants almost $100!”. Users are likely to feel manipulated and annoyed. The key point here is that users would have reacted differently if they were presented this information upfront – the problem lies in the order of presentation. With the right sales pitch, it could have come across as a great deal.

Pear Note records audio and/or video while you take your notes, so later you can find what was being said when you typed something. Wouldn’t it be great if this kind of functionality was added to Silveback or Morae?

Above is a screengrab from theacropolismuseum.gr, the site for the new Acropolis museum in Athens. It opened this year, and it’s turned out to be a very popular tourist attraction. With that in mind, it makes sense to book your tickets in advance. It’s not too hard to find this page (Hours & Ticketing), but the next step is to enter the ticket booking process. So, how do you do that? It’s almost like they’ve hidden the “Buy Tickets” call-to-action on purpose, as a nondescript link right at the bottom of the page. This is the online equivalent of designing a supermarket with the tills hidden in the stockroom – hardly the definition of good business sense.

Having clicked ‘Buy Tickets’, the user ends up here (above), which seems to be the first page of the booking process. The only thing we can see here is a text field. Where’s the rest of the stuff? Where’s the ‘next’ button? Where’s the steps-left indicator? It almost looks broken – as if the page hasn’t loaded properly. In fact, to proceed to the next step the user needs to enter a number into the text field, and then the next chunk of the form will suddenly be revealed. You can almost picture the user muttering to themselves – “Why on earth does this site have to work differently to the rest of the web?”

Having entered the number of tickets, this calendar widget appears (above). Today’s date is currently selected. What are you expected to do now? Once again, there is no clear call-to-action. In fact, you have to click any date in the future and it will reveal which times are available.

Phew! If the user’s got this far, they are probably getting the hang of this unconventional UI. They need to click on their desired timeslot to proceed, then they need to fill in their address, payment details and finally they reach a confirmation page, shown below.

Here’s the confirmation page. The user will expect this to be emailed to them – that’s normal practice, right? Not on this site. If they don’t save or print this page, they are going to have real trouble getting into the museum. This key instruction is written half-way down the page, but once again the designers have made the same mistake of providing a weak, easily missable call-to-action.

To sum up, I’m hoping that this example has given you a reminder about the crucial importance of strong calls-to-action. It’s obvious stuff really, but we all make schoolboy errors from time to time.

Even if your recruitment agency are trying their best, it’s sad reality that there’s diminishing returns in weeding out end users who fib. They can’t really hire in Columbo to investigate every user. And if, during the sessions, the research facilitator starts to suspect the participant might be a dud, what can they do? It’s an awkward situation, especially if they their client watching from behind the two-way mirror. The researcher can continue the interview without pushing the issue, or they can deviate from the script and start cross-questioning the participant on their honesty, which will ruin the rapport, take time, and probably won’t be effective in any case.

In fact, a lot of liars can be screened out by writing a really good screener questionnaire. For example, here’s a decoy question that the Mozilla metrics team used in their recent Test Pilot survey.

The goal of the question above was to ascertain the experience level of a respondent, so the data could be segmented. To sift out the deluded novices and liars, the Mozilla Metrics team added a made-up acronym – JFW – on the rationale that anyone who ticks “full understanding” for this item and all the others can be flagged as a suspect respondent.

Don’t believe me on the JFW acronym? I asked the Moz Labs team, just to be sure:

It’s also fairly likely you will want to recruit participants who have used your product a certain number of times. If you ask them directly (“Have you used mysite.com at least 3 times in the past month?”), the respondent will easily guess what they are meant to say to “win” the research. So, you should always hide the qualifying answer among a number of decoy questions, or by asking open questions.

Another trick I’ve recently started using is placing a stern warning on the screener about honesty. For example, if you’re testing an ecommerce site, you can state that a substantial part of the interview will involve being signed in to the site and referring to their purchase history page. If they don’t have a history spanning over 3 months, tell them they will be turned away without payment. This does sound a bit harsh, but it works.

To sum up, you face a real risk if you rely on your recruitment agency to take care of the screener behind the scenes. When engaging with a new agency, ask them what they do to screen out liars, and always be certain to review the final questionnaire before it gets deployed.

Do you have any other screener tips? Add them in the comments!

Swap out Yu Wan Mei mandated “Fish Time” with Windows 7 and you’ve pretty much captured the spirit of Microsoft’s marketing strategy. Check out the screen grabs from their screener survey below. It’s nuts!

Gee, I wonder which of these boxes I’m meant to tick in order to get my free copy of Windows 7?

Question 6: would you like to receive junk mail? Er, what are my options?

This is by far the best bit – check out what they want to do to your children. To quote from the second paragraph: “I, on behalf of myself and my children [...] hereby grant [...] an unrestricted, absolute, universal, perpetual, irrevocable, non-royalty bearing, and transferable right and license [...] to use, copy, transmit, distribute, display, modify, perform, present, publish, transform, create works and derivative works, and otherwise promote or utilize my name, image, likeness, voice, words and [...] personal information, and those of my children [...] captured, photographed or otherwise recorded or memorialized in any manner [...] (including, without limitation, print, direct mail, online, mobile or wireless communications, radio or television broadcast, telecast or photograph), for any purpose whatsoever (including, without limitation [...] advertising [...]), and without any consideration or notice to or consent by me or any third party.”

So, how badly do you want a free copy of Windows 7? Badly enough to give Microsoft complete, unrestricted rights to photos and videos of your children so they can use them in their advertising without even notifying you? Seriously?

I cannot imagine why they thought it was a good idea to hide this critical information in the small print. Whatever happened to good, old fashioned up-front honesty?

Has anyone actually tried them all and created an über comparison table? Not as far as I can tell. Instead I’m sort of hoping for some kind of K-T event to kill of all of the weaker ones. Not sure how that would work, though. Any ideas?

Amendment: post has been repeatedly edited to include additional tools.