"ux" via Rui Lopes in Google Reader

Where is the Modern Day Hypercard?

2012-06-01T13:08:54Z

Ars Technica writer Matthew Lasar got thinking about his happy memories with Hypercard and whatever happened to it. Released in 1987, it would have turned 25 years old this August had it not been withdrawn from the market in 2004. Entrepreneur and coder Tim Oren argued at the time that it never really figured out what it was. But creator Bill Atkinson admitted two years beforehand his crucial mistake: he didn’t take advantage of the web and let hypercard stacks connect over the internet as well as locally. Had he done that, things could have been very different.

So what does that have to do with today? As one commenter points out, it left a gap that has never really been filled:

The world desperately needs a modern version of Hypercard that lets *non-programmers* easily create and link entire new storehouses, repositories and novel worlds of information and aesthetic creations.

This is particularly pertinent in an age of data journalism being the new punk and ongoing arguments about whether people should or shouldn’t learn to code. (Let’s not even get started about designers and coding).

It’s also worth remembering that Hypercard was fun. See Lasar’s fist memory of the product :

But after we set up the Mac, I sat down with it one evening and noticed a program on the applications menu. “HyperCard?” I wondered. “What’s that?”

I opened the app and read the instructions. HyperCard allowed you to create “stacks” of cards, which were visual pages on a Macintosh screen. You could insert “fields” into these cards that showed text, tables, or even images. You could install “buttons” that linked individual cards within the stack to each other and that played various sounds as the user clicked them, mostly notably a “boing” clip that to this day I can’t get out of my mind. You could also turn your own pictures into buttons.

Intrigued, I began composing stacks. None of them amounted to anything more than doodle-packed matrices of images, sounds, and aphorisms, but I eventually glanced at my wrist watch. It was 4:00 AM. Startled and quite tired, I turned in with visions of stack buttons dancing in my head.

an you really say that about PHP or LISP? We’re getting there with Lego Mindstorms NXT-G language (seriously, their lego-like action system is addictive should you ever get the chance), but even the most accessible programs still require coding. The closest I’ve seen in the commercial sector would be If This Then That, but I’d argue it’s more of a global macro system than one that actually lets you do things.

[EDIT: of course, there's a Quora topic for that.]

How a Virus Changes the World

2012-06-01T11:50:07Z

From Take Part, a short video on how a virus spreads and its possible global effects. Apparently one million deaths could be prevented every year if people would just wash their hands regularly. Too bad there's that temporary allergy to soap and water people get after doing their business in public restrooms.

[via Brain Pickings]

Tasty Tweets makes smoothies based on trending fruits

2012-06-01T07:29:56Z

During a one-week visualization course at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Kat Zorina, Ruben van der Vleuten, and Kostantinos Frantzis put together a working prototype that makes smoothies based on mentions of fruit on Twitter.

Using the Twitter API, it collects tweets containing mentions of specific fruits such as blueberry, pineapple, apple and carrot and creates a smoothie that represents the blend. The smoothie is created based on the same proportions of fruits collected from the tweets. Because twitter trends change quickly, each smoothie has a unique palette of flavors.

Next steps: a blender that provides variable consistency like chunky versus completely blended, a scoop of sherbet, and free energy boost. Oh, the possibilities.

[via @golan]

Jeff Gothelf – Understanding Lean UX

2012-06-01T01:57:32Z

Cheating Or Good Design?

2012-05-31T00:00:00Z

A comment on Reddit (by raygundan) points out an interesting technique Apple uses on their iOS platform: when you switch apps, the device saves a screenshot of what the last screen looks like for that app so that when you switch back again, that saved screenshot is the first thing you see. This is done to buy time for the app to fully load. Instead of showing you a blank screen or a loading screen, the device shows you a screenshot of the app. This technique works because the time it takes to load the rest of the app isn’t very long anyway, so a second of showing a screenshot that the user cannot interact with doesn’t cause confusion. What it does do is make it looks as if the app has loaded instantly, which results in a very good experience for the user.

The commenter called this technique cheating, but isn’t it simply good design? If they showed a loading screen or a blank screen then presumably that wouldn’t be cheating because there is no deception involved, i.e. you’re not pretending that the app has loaded when it hasn’t. But what about applications that only load partially? I open a website, and while the bit of page that I see has rendered I cannot scroll down because the browser is still processing something else on the page? Granted, it still says it’s loading, but I am still presented with an interface that I cannot fully interact with. Of course I would rather see that bit of the page first rather than have to wait for everything to load before it shows me anything, so the tradeoff is a good one.

I think the screenshot idea falls in the same category. Rather than rendering the interface “properly”, you show it using a screenshot. It’s acceptable because you know the usable version will load in just a second, and so you make the tradeoff of annoying the few users who jump to interact with it right that second while making the experience feel faster for 100% of the use cases. Showing the interface instead of a loading screen also gives the user the information they need to interact with it. Instead of looking at a blank page, they’re looking at the controls and figuring out what they want to do with it. Once they do, chances are the actual interface has loaded, and so they can start using the app.

Announcing UX Intensive Atlanta

2012-05-31T18:22:00Z

Two months ago, I moved from Atlanta, Georgia, to the Bay Area to begin a new chapter of my career as a design director here at Adaptive Path's San Francisco studio. It has been everything I had hoped it would be and more... but I do find myself missing at times the incredibly vibrant and growing design community in my former home. With the influx of Fortune 500 companies that moved into the area the last decade, Atlanta experience strategy and design practitioners grew in number, expertise, and influence. It was exciting to be part of that growth and to see first hand all the great work and passion the city had to offer.

Which makes me even more excited to announce that our next UX Intensive will be coming to Hotlanta this fall. UX Intensive is our four-day crash course on core concepts and methods in Experience Strategy, Design Research, Interaction Design, and Service Design. As the name implies, each day is jam packed with engaging content and several fast-paced exercises to help participants learn by doing. It's exhausting but rewarding. And having taught at our last event in Amsterdam, I can tell you the Adaptive Path staff has a blast meeting all the participants and providing career advice and staying in touch well after our four days together come to an end.

So, I can't think of a better place to take our show on the road to next than Atlanta. I'm looking forward to introducing my new west coast workmates to the community and culture that continues to produce incredible design talent and work.

See what's in store each day and register at the UX Intensive site.

See you in October!

Reverse engineering targeted emails from 2012 Campaign

2012-05-31T15:34:04Z

After noticing the Obama campaign was sending variations of an email to voters, ProPublica identified six distinct types with certain demographics and showed the differences. It was called the Message Machine. Now ProPublica is taking it a step further, hoping to dissect every email from all 2012 campaigns.

Today, we are relaunching the Message Machine, and expanding it from handling just one mailing to handling every email from all of the campaigns in the 2012 election. It will seek a broad understanding in real time of the new and sophisticated ways modern campaigns are targeting voters.

It's a big puzzle, and to solve it, we need a big sample of political emails, and an understanding of who received them. That’s where you come in.

If you get campaign emails on any subject — donation, get-out-the-vote, volunteering, events, etc. — just forward them to emails@messagemachine.propublica.org using your email program's standard forwarding feature. Nothing fancier than that needed.

Way cool. Although I bet there will be a lot of noise, especially from the smaller, less data-savvy campaigns.

Amazon - When changing an item’s quantity in the basket to...

2012-05-31T13:50:39Z

Amazon - When changing an item’s quantity in the basket to 0, a link to remove the item appears.

/via Alex Muller

Typewriter installation remembers killed journalists

2012-05-31T13:53:52Z

Julian Koschwitz uses a typewriter linked to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists to generate stories about those who have fallen doing their jobs.

The typewriter installation On Journalism #2 Typewriter writes generatively constructed stories about all journalist who have been killed worldwide between 1992 and today based on the existing data of their lives as well as their published work. The individual stories are connected through common fields of coverage, places, professions and many other aspects. Besides the text the typewriter creates also images e.g. flags which are heavier distorted the more journalists got killed in that particular country.

10 Things to Know about the Single Usability Metric (SUM)

2012-05-31T05:50:00Z

There is no usability thermometer to tell you how easy to use a website or software application is.

Instead we rely on the outcomes of good and bad experiences which provide evidence for the construct of usability.

Combining multiple usability metrics into a single usability metric (SUM) is something we proposed seven years ago[PDF] and we wrote about in Chapter 9 of Quantifying the User Experience.

Here are 10 things to know about single measures of usability.

Usability is the intersection of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction (ISO 9241 pt 11). One of the best measures of usability is a combination of metrics that describes each of these aspects.
The most common usability metrics are completion rates and errors (effectiveness), task-times (efficiency) and task-level satisfaction (satisfaction). These metrics tend to have a moderate correlation[PDF] with each other of r = .3 to .5. The correlation is strong enough to suggest an overlap (e.g., users that commit more errors tend to take longer) but the correlation isn't strong enough that one metric can substitute for the other.
By averaging together a standardized version of completion rates, task-times, task-level satisfaction and errors you generate a Single Usability Metric (SUM) which summarizes the majority of information in all four measures. By averaging you weight each metric equally. Despite many discussions for determining which metric "counts" more, our analysis found that a simple average is least subjective and reflects the data best (from a principal components analysis[PDF]). Keep in mind that if you weight one metric a lot then you must lessen the weight of another, often to a point where an additional metric does little.
You can have 3 metric or 4 metric versions of SUM: Errors are usually the most time consuming and difficult to collect metric (especially in unmoderated testing) so completion rates, task-times and task-satisfaction provide the minimum description of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction for a single usability metric.
A single usability metric doesn't replace the individual metrics; it simply summarizes them in a more condensed way like an abstract to a long paper or like the mean summarizes a large set of numbers. With any summarization comes data loss, but the gain in interpretability usually far outweighs the loss—especially considering you don't "lose" anything as you can always dive into the individual metrics (like you can read the details of a paper).
There are a number of reasonable ways to combine usability metrics. One of the best ways we've found is to convert everything into a percentage. For discrete metrics (completion rates and errors) this is done by generating a proportion and for continuous metrics (time and satisfaction) we generate a normalized "z-score" and convert it to percentage then average the metrics together.
To convert discrete data so they are amenable to combining:

For completion rates: they are already in the percentage form. An 80% completion rate stays as 80%.
For errors: you need to convert the raw number of errors into a proportion by identifying the opportunities for errors and subtracting this proportion by 1 (so higher proportions are better). If 10 users commit 20 errors and there are 5 opportunities for an error per task the error rate is 20/50 = .40. Subtracting this value from 1 reverses the error rate so higher percentages are better 1-.4 = 60%.

To convert continuous data so they are amenable to combining:

For task-level satisfaction: if you are using the standardized task-level metric like the SEQ you can use the percentile rank. If you have a 5-point or 7-point scale then common specification limits are 4 (for a 5 point scale) and 5 (for a 7 point scale). For example, an average score of a 5.6 on a 7 point scale with a standard deviation of 2 becomes (5.6-5)/2 = .3. The .3 is a z-score and gets converted into a percentage =61.7%.

For task times you need to identify how long a task should take (a specification limit) and subtract the mean time from the successful task attempts. There's an art to determining[pdf] how long a task should take. For example, if the average time is 50 seconds with a standard deviation of 40 seconds and the spec time is 80 seconds we get a z-score of (50-80)/40 = -.75. The -.75 is a z-score and we convert it to a percentage (which is the area under the curve up to -.75 standard deviations) and we get .2266. We subtract this value from 1 (because we want times to be less than the spec limit) which generates a percentage of 1-.2266 = 77.3%

A single usability metric is ideal for dashboards, for comparing competing products[pdf] and tasks when you need a single dependent variable to describe the complex construct of usability. Given the four example metrics shown above, we get a SUM of (80%+60%+61.7%+77.3%)/4 = 69.75%.
You can convert raw usability metrics into a SUM score by using the free downloadable Excel spreadsheet or the usability scorecard application.

I’m looking for a new UX opportunity

2012-05-31T04:32:00Z

Hello readers, I am currently looking for a new opportunity and if you have one or are aware of one, I would appreciate your letting me know by emailing me at hello@conetrees.com

In summary, I have 6 and a half years of experience in client interaction, planning, leading, managing and executing projects working through user research, data synthesis and ideation, information architecture, interaction design and usability testing.

Some clients I have recently worked for, many of which we got repeat work from for great project execution and client satisfaction at PebbleRoad, Singapore are (with digital agencies as partners and otherwise) include Standard Chartered, VISA, DHL, Guinness, Singtel and government agencies of Singapore.

Some accomplishments that may be worth highlighting are:

I am a contributing author to the book, UX StoryTellers- Connecting the Dots.
I have designed and run The UX Bookmark (uxbookmark.com) and Cone Trees (conetres.com). They are featured in popular UX aggregators, acute search engines and design galleries like All Top user interface section, UX URLs and UX Pond.
I presented expert tutorial titled ‘Usability Testing in India’ at the India HCI/ IDID 2010 conference at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai n March 2010.
Some of my usability testing and interaction design articles featured in BCSCHI’s Usability News and published in Evolt. My usability Testing presentation featured on the front page of SlideShare.
I was a member of the Executive of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Special Interest Group 13.1 on Interaction Design & International Development (IDID)
My user interface widget libraries (clear input and gestures) featured on the Axure RP website and Wireframes magazine.

Have a great day.

America Revealed on PBS

2012-05-31T00:50:53Z

I'm not sure how I missed this, but PBS's America Revealed, which has apparently been running since last month, is the American version of the popular Britain From Above. Four episodes have aired so far on transportation, electricity, and manufacturing, along with a making-of episode. Here's a clip from the transportation episode.

The series airs on Wednesdays at 10/9c. Although it looks like the full series ran already. It wouldn't make much sense to go over the making-of in the middle. On the upside, four episodes are available online.

Had I known this existed, maybe I wouldn't have subjected myself to the monstrosity of a show in United Stats of America.

Diminishing Returns

2012-05-30T00:00:00Z

Smashing Magazine published a good article by Paul Scrivens titled “MUD: Minimum Usable Design” in which the author talks about satisfying groups of audiences, starting with the largest — i.e. what is the minimum that the site must do for the majority of users — and then following on to the smaller and smaller ones, that is, implementing more specialized features. Like an MVP (minimum viable product), which introduces the bare bones feature set needed to get the first sale (maybe just one feature), a MUD is a design that starts by implementing the very basic stuff needed to get it to work for the largest audience. It’s a good thought exercise in prioritizing your design process.

In economics, there is a term called the law of diminishing returns. The idea is that as you add more and more of a specific factor of production to your process (e.g. assigning more people to a task), while keeping everything else constant, there will come a point at which each unit will start to yield less and less returns. In some cases adding even more of this factor will decrease the overall output (too many cooks spoil the broth). For example: there is an optimal amount of fertilizer you should use to improve crop production. Past this optimal point you can still keep adding more fertilizer, but the improvement you will see per unit will decrease, and if you add too much you may even be in danger of reducing the crop yield.

It’s the same with design, much like the way Paul has expressed in his article. Once you implement the core foundation, you’ve satisfied most users, and as you go up from there, adding more and more features and refinements, the payoff for your efforts will steadily fall. There’s never a truly perfect design in the sense that our work will never arrive to a point where no further improvement or changes can be made. Use the idea of the law of diminishing returns to recognize situations when the amount of effort spent isn’t going to make a big enough difference to justify itself. Reflect, prioritize and draw a line. Limiting your work by prioritizing efforts is not the same thing as putting in less effort into the execution just so it’s “good enough”. It’s about figuring out what matters and implementing this in the best way you can.

Information Architecture, A Global Perspective

2012-05-30T22:43:52Z

Show Time: 35 minutes 20 seconds

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Podcast Summary

On today’s show I had the pleasure to talking with the first Global Director for World Information Architecture Day, Jessica DuVerneay.

Jessica talks about her time helping to organize the first annual World IA Day including how the event came to life, the phenomenal support and experiences at all events, as well as her roles and responsibilities as a Director.

New Global Director for WIAD Needed!

The Information Architecture Institute is seeking a new Gobal Director for World IA Day in February 2013 and we look forward to hearing from those interested in taking on this volunteer position!

If you are interested in hosting an official World IA Day event please send an email to either the general mailbox for World IA Day info@worldiaday.org or Noreen Whysel operations@iainstitute.org

Campaigns Are Where Conversion Rates Shine – Moving Beyond Conversion Rates, Part 4

2012-05-30T22:39:18Z

Moving Beyond Conversion Rates:

Part 1: Avoid Ratios for Metrics
Part 2: Not All Visitors Make Great Customers
Part 3: Visitors Are Not All The Same
Part 4: Campaigns Are Where Conversion Rates Shine (this)

It was a little magic sticker with an image of a gold treasure chest that changed everything. The brilliant marketers at Publishers Clearing House added the sticker to their newest sweepstakes mailing. All the recipient need do is move it from its backing and stick it on the entry card.

And, millions did just that. Something about taking action and moving that sticker caused more folks to enter the sweepstakes than ever before. The Gold Box campaign was one of the most successful direct mail campaign ever, all because of a little sticker.

Direct mail is where the conversion rate was born. And the Publishers Clearing House Gold Box campaign was the first time that conversion rates really shined. The marketers proved, with clever marketing, you could dramatically increase conversion, which in turn, increased revenues. (Most of their sweepstakes entries also included magazine orders.)

The Gold Box campaign followed a typical direct mail conversion process. Publishers Clearing House sent out a mailer. Any recipient who chose to take part returned the sweepstakes entry and order form. The conversion rate was the number of returned forms divided by the number of mailers sent.

Campaigns Are Where Conversion Rates Shine

Campaigns are the one place where a conversion rate makes sense to measure. Remember, in Part 1 of our series, we talked about how you get into trouble with ratios? Well, with the Gold Box campaign, Publishers Clearing House controlled how many mailers they sent out, so they controlled the denominator. Check.

In Part 2, we talked about how some visitors are not good customers. Yet, when you have a campaign like this one, you can carefully choose who you mail to, so you can make sure everyone is the kind of customer you want. Check.

In Part 3, we talked about how not every visitor is the same. Again, PCH could carefully choose who they sent the mailers to, so they were the same. Check.

Specific campaigns are where we can use conversion rates for what they are good for: giving us a comparison on which variants work. The thing is that direct mail is subtly different from marketing on the web – a distinction a lot of marketers miss.

Let’s take apart the PCH Gold Box campaign:

Start: Send out mailers
Conversion: Recipient sends back entry and order form

It’s that simple.

Now, let’s look at how a similar campaign to give a free trial to a new magazine might look on the web, to a prospective new subscriber.

Start: Place an ad on a web site the prospect might visit.
Conversion #1: Prospect spots and clicks on ad, which brings them to landing page for free trial.
Conversion #2: Prospect fills out form and gets sent the free trial along with an order form.
Conversion #3: Prospect chooses to subscribe.

There are three conversions here, not only one like in the Gold Box campaign. Conversion #3 depends on #2, and #2 depends on #1. You can’t get to the third step without converting through the first 2.

(Some marketers in this situation try to remove the third conversion by making the free trial an “opt out” conversion – the subscriber has to explicitly cancel their subscription before the trial ends instead of having to explicitly choose to subscribe. Of course, this is a dark pattern and shouldn’t be encouraged. However, you can see why it’s so appealing to the marketer, since it eliminates that last conversion.)

This is why campaigns online aren’t as easy to measure as campaigns in direct mail. It’s possible that the a broken #1 produces crappy results all the way through. You have to tweak each step simultaneously, whereas the Publishers Clearing House folks only had one conversion to optimize.

Conversion rates work great for simple campaigns. In the final installment, we’ll talk about alternatives you can use for other situations.

Moving Beyond Conversion Rates:

Part 1: Avoid Ratios for Metrics
Part 2: Not All Visitors Make Great Customers
Part 3: Visitors Are Not All The Same
Part 4: Campaigns Are Where Conversion Rates Shine (this)

Meshu makes physical objects with your location

2012-05-30T21:50:33Z

Location data typically stays within the realm of online maps and digital check-ins, but in many ways it's the most personal data that you can find. It represents where you are, where you've been, and where you're going. Meshu, by Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx, is a project that takes this sentiment to heart.

Select and enter locations on a map or grab your check-ins from foursquare to create your own piece of unique jewelry — necklace, earrings, or cufflinks. Once you've got your design, you have your choice of acrylic, wood, nylon, and silver and you can pick from a variety of colors for each material. Hit complete, they'll fabricate it, and you've got your own personal snapshot of life.

Coda 2 - The submit button of the order form doubles as a...

2012-05-30T13:58:54Z

Coda 2 - The submit button of the order form doubles as a progress bar.

/via chrishrmnn

UIEtips: The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question

2012-05-30T19:24:04Z

Ratings and reviews can generate quite a lot of money. Who hasn’t asked a friend, peer, or family member their opinion on products or services, especially on something you’re about to purchase? A simple, “it did the job” or “it’s worth the money” is enough to convince most people to complete their purchase.

How these ratings and reviews are communicated to the potential buyer on your web site is critical. It can be the difference between a handful of sales or thousands of sales.

In today’s UIEtips we look back at an article that focuses on Amazon’s review processes. Amazon asks a simple question, one you’ve probably seen a thousand times &nash; yet it is critical to the
success of the business and likely to be the reason behind billions of dollars of revenue at Amazon.

This story comes from our research of Amazon, independent of any projects we’ve done for them. Therefore, our revenue projections are estimates. But even if we’re off by an order of magnitude, it’s still an impressive number that tells us how a well-thought-out design can make a big difference.

Read the article: The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question

If you’re looking for ways to implement a rating or review system on your site, or want to improve an existing process, tune into our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing for Ratings and Reviews with Erin Malone. Erin will show you the benefits and drawbacks to various ratings systems, whether you want to increase sales on an e–commerce site or promote the visibility of your product.

Are you implementing a rating or review system on your site? Have you made improvements to an existing process? Share your thoughts with us below.

Hans Rosling one-minute TED talk

2012-05-30T17:38:36Z

Screw the sword swallowing and giant screen of moving bubbles. Just get Rosling a handful of rocks and he draws a crowd.

[via infosthetics]

Personality:The fourth essential of a customer-centric business

2012-05-30T10:41:18Z

We use web browsers every day and don’t really think about them until something goes wrong. Google Chrome crashed on me the other day and I got the iconic “Aw, Snap!” page with the unhappy folder icon. Instead of being cross at the error, it made me smile, and I was more forgiving of the browser for crashing. This is an example of how personality can engage customers’ emotions and help them build a stronger relationship with your brand.

While predictability, efficiency, and convenience are assumed for worthwhile product or service experiences in today's market, just being 'useful' is no longer...read more
By Sarah Richards, Matthew Ballesteros

"ux" via Rui Lopes in Google Reader

Where is the Modern Day Hypercard?

How a Virus Changes the World

Tasty Tweets makes smoothies based on trending fruits

Jeff Gothelf – Understanding Lean UX

Cheating Or Good Design?

Announcing UX Intensive Atlanta

Reverse engineering targeted emails from 2012 Campaign

Amazon - When changing an item’s quantity in the basket to...

Typewriter installation remembers killed journalists

10 Things to Know about the Single Usability Metric (SUM)

I’m looking for a new UX opportunity

America Revealed on PBS

Related

Diminishing Returns

Information Architecture, A Global Perspective

Podcast Summary

New Global Director for WIAD Needed!

Campaigns Are Where Conversion Rates Shine – Moving Beyond Conversion Rates, Part 4

Moving Beyond Conversion Rates:

Campaigns Are Where Conversion Rates Shine

Moving Beyond Conversion Rates:

Meshu makes physical objects with your location

Coda 2 - The submit button of the order form doubles as a...

UIEtips: The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question

Hans Rosling one-minute TED talk

Personality:The fourth essential of a customer-centric business