The session was led by Bermon Painter (@bermonpainter), Dustan Kasten (@iamdustan) and Assaf Weinberg (@assafweinberg) and hosted at Ally Bank. Apparently Ally have a great UX group with their own usability lab but due to the unexpected popularity of the meetup, we had to utilise a conference room for the user testing and discussion.

Remote Testing Tools

The session started with a presentation, which suggested the use of inexpensive online tools to run usability tests. Here are a few of recommendations:

FiveSecondTest – Conducting a five second test allows you to find out which parts of your designs are the most prominent

There are two main options with this tool:

1. Memory Test – Users get 5 seconds to review the design and asked to remember specific elements.
2. Click Test – Users get 5 seconds to localate and click on specific elements

You can run closed or open tests but most of the testers are web savvy so make sure to read through and extropolate the most useful test results.

Navflow – Navflow helps you improve your conversion rates by analysing how people navigate around your websites and applications

With this tool, you upload a series of images that represent a multiple page user path. As with fivesecondtest, you can have an open or closed test (handy for sensitive mockups) but in this case there is no time limit.

Websort – enables you to conduct remote card sorting online.

It’s a great way to gather feedback from users about how information on your site should be managed. You simply create a study, invite users via a link and analyse the results.

Websort also allows you to export your study for use on PlainFrame, which is ‘usability testing for website navigation and app menus’. This tool will present results on how users interact with your navigation structure, which plays an important role in the usability and ease of navigation of your site.

Although these tools cannot compare with a fully functional testing lab, the benefit is that the tools are inexpensive and allow you to return test results very quickly.

Coffee Shop Testing

If you are keen on lab situations then there is a great alternative – ‘Coffee Shop’ testing. All you need is a laptop, specific questions and goals, a friendly personality and some courage, oh and maybe some ‘sweetners’ as a back up. Major benefits of this type of testing are that you don’t have to recruit heavily or use expensive resources and you can run through several iterations (five users per iteration) in one week.

As with any user testing, planning is key! You must know what you are testing, have a clear set of goals (e.g clarity of labels, ease of signup), specify your methodology and target audience, and have a strategy to measure your results.

Testing Tips

Assaf Weinberg is an advocate of these tests as he’s experienced success when conducting tests for Travelocity. Here are few tips to completing successful test:

• You must test the test prior to using it in the coffee shop.
• You need to start with warm questions. It’s Important to start by making the user feel comfortable by providing some background and discussing various subjects with them, such as their hobbies and interests.
• Let the user know what’s going to happen before you do it e.g I’m going to show the website homepage.
• Encourage the user to explore and explain their experience.
• You must be careful not to lead the subjects. Ask open questions.
• Make it clear that there are no wrong answers.
• Don’t use the words: ‘We’, ‘Test’ or ‘Survey’. People don’t like to feel that they are being tested or are conducting surveys. They also don’t like the suggestion that you are not alone in conducting the test.
• Do use the words: ‘I’, ‘Help’ and ‘Opinion’. People love to help and offer opions, it gives them a feeling of value.
• A gift card can help sway the user your way if they are undecided about helping or offering an opinion.
• Try not to take notes during the test.

Startbucks is a great place to carry out the tests as there are lots of corporate users and not many highly experienced web savvy users, who could potentially distort your test results. You can also buy (multi-location) gift cards which can be used to sway the undecided users.

Testing Users

At the end of the presentation, we watched as test users were walked through an example website. In each case the user was shown the website for 5/7 seconds then asked to remember the elements. Open questions such as ‘Look around and let us know how you feel’, ‘is there anything else that would interest you’, ‘is that what you expected’, and ‘what do you know about the site’ were used to great effect. The results from the test presented the website developer with suggestions and recommendation on how they could improve the user experience and sign-up rate. It is obvious from these examples that user testing is an essential part of the development process, which can be included in a project inexpensively.

The race for second and third was slightly more interesting with David and Matt battling with friend of Dusted, Nic Achampong. However with Nic using most of his transfers early in the tournament, he had lost his second place by the end of the final whistle. A tactical captain choice by Matt (garnering him double points from goal scorer Iniesta) was enough to push him ahead of David, much to Mr Wall’s disappointment.

As for the remaining Dusted players, they all suffered from breaks away from the office and quite clearly paid for their leisurely approaches — apart from Darren who was just too busy to maintain his team.

The Dusted Fantasy Football league results

The title being ‘iPhone chips away at RIM dominance‘ eludes to the platform being at the core of the debate, and probably the biggest barrier to the business case (in reality). This was one of the first instances I’ve seen where Apple actually eclipsed all the hype and for me showed that market gravitas and pure hardcore usefulness, coupled with intuitive design-led R&D, have forced a corporate to break the rules based on Apple delivering the brand promise (as we call it). I know it’s a small blip in the market, and everyone (outside of business and finance) has been using iPhones for years, but the line “… also based on them being seen as a useful business tool…” embodies the technological step-change we are witnessing. This article form IT Business Edge goes into it in more depth: RIM vs. Apple: Should Cisco Buy RIM?

With this tiny bit of news in a mainstream UK financial paper, it really proves that even once ‘too-cool-for-school’ technology applications of existing media channels, with enough contributing cerebral input, can turn industries around and make it into the mainstream. Blackberry must be quaking in their boots (but I have to say that looking at the 20-plus Apple devices in my office this comment may have a slightly bias slant).

So, we should probably raise a glass to the Standard Chartered IT team who have boldly put their head above the banking PR parapet and announced such a revolution. This move may open the flood gates as I would expect a large proportion would have both devices running (iPhone for personal/ Blackberry for work), and probably left feeling underwhelmed when they have to use their preferred alternative – which ever that may be? I could make a guess…

As with all technological adoption cycles, the iPhone seems to be following the same path, but will we be referring to all hand held web-enabled smart phones as ‘iPhones’ regardless of manufacturer in the future? Maybe? Who knows…

Just a few desks remain available in our smart, professional studio space in SE1. Would suit small businesses or sole trader who is looking for a modern, central London location. Take two or more spaces and benefit from a discounted rate of just £295 per month (per desk).

Our office is just a 10-minute stroll down Bermondsey Street from London Bridge Station (soon to be home to The Shard) and within walking distance of the new riverside development at More London, Tower Bridge and Shad Thames (where you’ll find endless restaurants and the Design Museum). The no. 188 bus from Waterloo even stops right outside the front door.

We have 4 desks available and rent includes:

• Desk
• Chair
• Phone
• Heating
• Lighting
• Power
• Cleaning
• Network
• Alarm/CCTV
• Lockable storage

Along with:

• Use of boardroom
  (10-seater with large display and conference call facilities)
• Use of meeting room
  (6-seater also with large display and conference call facilities)
• Use of breakout area
• Use of reception area
• Use of roof terraces
• Use of bathroom (of course!)
• Use of shower room
• Use of kitchen

Optional extras:

• Use of fax
• Use of broadband
• Use of colour copier/printer
• Use of masseuse (yes really!)

If you’d like to get a flavour of the place, check out these pictures of the current Dusted studio. If you’d like pop down and take a look at the place in person, feel free to drop us a line and arrange a visit.

Darren said…
We should modernise and include the channels and options people now use every day. A secure, web-enabled system that allows both Internet and mobile voting alongside more traditional methods, like post and local polling stations (with modern technology), would maximise ‘turnout’, accelerate the process and be all-inclusive. By implementing progressive multi-channel accessibility, user experience and data processing we may even keep up with the rest of the world! The result will then be truly representative.

Sarah said…
I would introduce a digital system with the option for postal votes and maybe the odd polling station still dotted around. Almost everyone has access to a computer so it makes sense. That would then give you the opportunity for having a great website that both details and summarises the various policies. So people could take a mini quiz to help them out if they know nothing about politics. There could be a fabulous, simple interface that summarises what each local candidate is promising and then one click takes you to the national issues that party stands for, a clear glossary of terms to explain technical terms and case studies that explore how life would theoretically change for various people under each potential party. There should also be an option to vote for a particular party but reject the current leader and force them to choose another.

Nick said…
I think that compulsory enrollment (registration) to vote should be enforced but not compulsory voting. Although I do not believe people should be forced to vote for a cause they do not agree with, I do think that a majority of people do not vote because they simply forget to register or don’t have time. By making registration compulsory this eliminates idleness and at least calls people to consider/ educate themselves on current affairs before voting or not voting.

David said…
Following the leaders debates on TV, the obvious answer is a Britain’s Got Talent style contest. Allowing people to vote online is perhaps more likely though. Would be more secure than postal votes and perhaps even ensure the turnout was greater than 65%

Matt said…
Let’s bring it bang up to date and let people cast votes via Twitter. Each candidate has their own #hashtag and the one topping the “trending topics” on Election Day becomes Prime Minister. Trouble is there is a real possibility it will be Justin Bieber

James said…

1. Electoral reform – proportional representation. Unfair this year that the Lib Dems got 10% more votes than last time yet lost seats
2. The actual voting experience – instructing people properly with well communicated graphics (it was not even clear at my polling station whether you should put a tick or cross next to persons name – many people were confused).
3. Also, why are we not voting via the Internet yet? Due to the massive queues some people got to vote this year – it would seem a good idea to introduce an internet voting system where each constituency gets its own site which people access and vote on. Then one central computer could gather the data and calculate the numbers more quickly.
4. Also opinion papers like the Sun should be banned from reporting on anything regarding the election.

Jamie said…
The perfect voting system would be a really simple, cool mobile device app (web based for those without) which presented a pic of the party leader, next to their top three principles, percentage of tax you’ll pay, and a scale of their corruption level (user vote). An alternative would be to go with the US model which consists of outspending your opponent’s ad budget!

Vilmar said…
I am going to use the Brazilian electoral system as a comparison, even though we have two different political systems – namely Parliamentary and Presidential. Voting in Brasil is compulsory, which apparently contradicts one of the Democratic principles based on citizens’ freewill but on the other hand it does push people to participate in the political process. I imagine it being extremely difficult for people in the UK to accept any bill in which they ‘ought to do anything out of their will. However, as exemplified in Brasil, the government decrees National Voting Day were people have the day off to vote. They go to the poll station in their vicinity where they are. The Electoral Authority delivers the electronic voting machines to all poll stations the night before and by morning they are all up and running; they form a nation-wide network feeding into high-security servers based in the capital, Brasília. There is virtually no paper involved in the process (apart from ballots that have to be put in place for the most isolated communities in the Amazon region and similar). It is all electronic. The results are ready within approximately 12hrs after the Election Day ends, and that’s for a country whose population is around 193 million people and counting (not all voters obviously but still…).

This year the conference was spread over two days (with one day of workshops preceding it) as opposed to the previous single day. Carsonfied, the organisers, also created a two track programme of presentations, essentially quadrupling the talk quantity from previous incarnations. As they say, quality is better than quantity, and luckily they didn’t scrimp on the quality. Here are some of my highlights.

Day One

Brendan Dawes – Play. Create. Destroy.

The day couldn’t have got off to a much better start than with Brendan. Everything from his experimental doodler presentation through to his “talk – action = shit” slide was engaging and interesting. He spoke of web designers’ obsession with rules and why, as an industry, we should loosen up, while at the same time saying that constraints are good. Although this seems contradictory, Brendan made it make perfect sense. We just need to push the boundaries occasionally and subtly to keep interest.

Aarron Walter – Emotional Interface Design

Who better to talk about adding character to design than the man behind Freddy. Freddy is the chimp that features on Mailchimp. Aarron was first to bring the quote “usable = edible” to our attention (it cropped up several times throughout the conference). You don’t go to a restaurant to simply eat edible food. Of course it’s important for it to be edible, but you want it to be delightful and pleasurable. There is no reason why a boring but perfectly usable form can’t have a bit of personality injected into it where appropriate.

Brad Haynes – Smart tips for wireframing

My first trip to track two of the conference, a setting that I preferred – smaller more intimate that seemed to draw the audience in more-so than the massive track one hall. Any presentation that includes a Bruce Lee quote – “the best style is no style” – is a winner in my eyes. What was great about this talk is that it qualified the wireframe processes that we use at Dusted. Brad highlighted the several ways of creating wireframes including low-fidelity and high-fidelity finishes, but also recommended a very interesting method of presenting designs when moving on from wireframes.

Day two

Bruce Lawson – HTML5 live demo

This was one of the only a handful of presentations that concentrated on the raw skills of web designers and certainly the only one that delved into the practical. Bruce used the example of embedding video directly into a page with HTML5. What it did highlight is that even with this technology, browser differences are going to, for the foreseeable future, make it hard work to include video with this method. This is down to fact that there isn’t one video format that all the browsers support,meaning that content creators will need to encode at least two different formats as well as possibly relying on a Flash-based fallback. However, Bruce did demonstrate what’s great about HTML5 – the semantic nature of the new elements available and the pliability of it. I’m not totally convinced that this loose approach to strict mark-up is necessarily a great thing though.

Aral Balkan – The art of emotional design

Aral gave, for me, the best talk of the conference. Back in the intimate track two room, he had just the right balance of humour, humility and information to just hit the mark for me, and it would seem the rest of the packed room. In fact he presented in a style becoming of his subject matter. Like Aarron previously, Aral spoke of going from usable to delightful – experience design rather than user experience. He discussed giving empathy to web sites and applications whilst avoiding the Microsoft Clippy approach.

Jon Hicks – Icon Design

This was a great guide to icon design with hints and tips for the season designer as well as the beginners. Jon walked us through his process showing the potential pitfalls as well as handy hints for creating better icons.

These are just a handful of noteworthy presentations and there were several others that inspired including Remy Sharp, Robin Christopherson, Dan Cederholm, Sarah Parmenter and Simon Collison to name just a few. Overall, Future of Web Design 2010 could possibly be one of the best conferences I’ve been to in recent years – and that has nothing to do with the fact that it was fully catered, I promise.

Selection of photos on Flickr

Take a look at these photos on flickr

In true non-confrontational fashion, I disagree with neither viewpoint. Flash isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but the days when entire sites are built with it are numbered in my opinion. Anyone who insists on their site being done in Flash is missing the point (Flash for Flash’s sake).

HTML5/CSS3 will make it possible for designers/developers to create rich, animated and interactive experiences using nothing but browser technology. Check out these 2 examples of what’s possible with the latest CSS.

Now, currently no-one can see these as shown here unless they’ve got the latest nightly build of Webkit, and here-in lies the problem. I’m all for graceful degradation, but it’s a difficult thing to sell in – especially if the client isn’t seeing all the bells and whistles that they’ve requested.

There are sites from Dusted’s past that were 100% Flash and, if they were to be designed and built today, there is no reason why the majority of them couldn’t be done using current browser technology (XHTML/CSS/JS) to achieve comparable results, let alone if we used HTML5/CSS3. In fact there are probably a couple that could be rebuilt without anyone actually noticing. The obvious advantage to this is not having to worry about users without access to the Flash plug-in, which is greater now, thanks to Steve Jobs’ insistence.

One group of people that have always loved a Flash solution is photographers. When it comes to the iPhone/iPad, and photographers websites, I think an approach that acts a lot like the Photos app (flipping through full-screen images) would be a great solution and would be totally possible in HTML5/CSS3. In fact, that’s not a bad idea. Make a note of it for me!

On the flipside, take sites with gaming elements to it, such as our recently launched Ani-mates website. There is no way that this site could have been done in anything but Flash, and for the target audience it was definitely the right way to go. So it’s a classic case of the right solution for the problem. Flash may well be the right solution in many cases.

So, yes, I think that Flash-built websites will eventually go the way of the dodo, but Flash will live on for some time until every single user is on IE 9+ / Firefox 3+ / Safari 4+ / Chrome 5+ / Opera 10+ … and, yes, it pains me to say it.

They say never work with children or animals, but this advice was quickly forgotten when Dusted was appointed to design and develop the website for the new kids collectables, Top Dogs – the first in a series of Ani-mates from partworks publisher, Mini-Mix.

Anyone with younger kids will appreciate the collectable craze that can sweep a school playground and Ani-mates are specifically priced at ‘pocket money’ levels for this reason. Each randomly sorted and sealed pack contains a head nodding, rock ‘n’ rolling, tail wagging pooch with paw shape stand and game card.

Codes printed on the packs allow access to the competition area of the new website which Dusted designed and developed after winning a credentials pitch in January. Developed entirely in Flash, the site uses an illustrated  menu, based around a street metaphor to allow the main character – top dog himself, ‘Beefy’ – to explore various buildings and view the whole collection, vote for a favourite, play games and buy packs online.

3D seems to be coming back into fashion lately with 3D cinema in full swing and 3D television just on the horizon, could we be looking at a 3D web in the future or maybe a resurgence in 3D printed design? There are already a handful of websites that use anaglyphic 3D (utilising red/blue glasses) including a 3D YouTube channel and .net magazine recently had a 3D cover and feature for their 200th issue.

With advances in display technology we’ll most likely see the same technology currently used on the big screen moving to our desktops with 3D displays for our computers. We wont have to wear strange cardboard frames and coloured lenses which make us look like throw-backs to the 50s, instead opting for Ray-Ban style polarised bins so we at least look like slightly more up-to-date 80s throw-backs.

Following the Queen’s Speech last November, the Digital Economy Bill has been hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Not least because of criticism from consumer rights and privacy groups regarding the ‘three strikes’ scheme – an initiative aimed at addressing online copyright infringement which could see the Internet connections of persistent offenders, cut off.

Not surprisingly, record companies, recording artists and writers will likely support the bill. Rather surprisingly, so does Feargal Sharkey, but I only mention this as I’ve recently learnt he’s the CEO of UK Music – an umbrella organisation representing the collective interests of our commercial music industry… For some ISP’s, it would seem a good heart these days is still hard to find (a good heart) as BT and TalkTalk have publically opposed the bill, voicing a preference for court fines for repeat offenders (as opposed to facing fines themselves for non-compliance).

As the government, Feargal and the ISP’s continue their crusades; much of the detail has also come under closer scrutiny, in particular Clause 17 which (allegedly) allows ministers to muck around with future copyright law at their whim, and Clause 43 (previously Clause 42) which some are saying, essentially makes every picture on the Internet free.

This, as you can imagine, could have a hugely damaging effect on the creative industry, especially for photographers and illustrators who rely on the Web as a primary sales tool. Stop43.org, a new site dedicated to campaigning against the Clause, neatly describes the problem:

“Until now, if someone found one of your photographs and wanted to use it commercially, they couldn’t without first asking you. Clause 43 changes all that by allowing the use of ‘Orphan Works’ – photographs, illustrations and other artworks whose owners cannot be found.”

In other words:
“Clause 43 says that if someone finds your photograph, wants to use it and decides that they can’t trace you, they can do whatever they like with it after paying an arbitrary fee to a UK Government-appointed ‘licensing body’.”

This licensing body is yet to be determined and while it does at least say works ‘found’ via the Web will still have to be paid for, it doesn’t say how copyright holders will be properly remunerated or the sort of use that will be permissible. This absence of clarity, it seems, is the primary concern for copyright owners but the Association of Illustrators talks a much calmer view, highlighting the fact that amendments are still being tabled and discussed as the Bill makes its way through the House of Lords.

However, this grey area could mislead people into thinking everything they find via Google Images doesn’t have to be paid for… Although I can’t help thinking some people already think this is the case. The likes of Getty and iStock must think so as they make it very clear who the copyright owners are, but for the rest of us, will it mean watermarking everything we put up online?

Photo credit: Flickr user bruchez