Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
I was extremely excited today to receive an email from Clearleft that I had been selected to be a beta tester for their new application, Silverback. Silverback is a user testing application for Macs only that makes use of the hardware available to create a pseudo-user testing environment on demand.
I ran a few tests on coworkers this morning using the application and was simply blown away by its ease of use and useful features. Within 60 seconds I had my first project setup, my first user profile created and was running a test of Clockwork’s products. The most exciting part came when I ended the first test and exported the Quicktime movie file that was created.
Opening up the movie I was greeted by a full scale representation of my desktop, along with a picture-in-picture view of the user in the lower right hand corner. The application recorded everything that the webcam could see for facial reactions as well as audio from my Macbook Pro’s built in microphone. The screencast of the entire desktop allowed for me to watch what the user was doing as well as reported any clicks with small overlaid circles.
This type of basic user testing functionality built into my laptop and organized neatly in one application simply blew me away. It’s a great substitute for anyone without a dedicated testing lab (which few small scale companies have available), and even if you do have one; it makes for an awesome portable test station, no extra cameras or one way mirrors needed.
I’ll be posting more about my beta experiences in the near future, but it would be suffice to say that Silverback will be a must have application for anyone working on creating websites or interfaces for web applications. Since it allows for full desktop usage I’m sure it would also be super useful for anyone testing desktop applications as well.
For the latest on Silverback, you can follow the Silverback Twitter Account.
Enjoy the screenshots! Click them to view a larger version on Flickr:
Posted in Design, Personal, Usability | 22 Comments »
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
As someone who is always reading three books at a time, I’ve read more than a fair few of books on aspects of the web design industry. Unfortunately I think quite a few of them are duds; while others are particularly good. So good in fact, that I lend them out frequently to friends. Recently, one of them asked me for a list of the ones that I thought were the best, and I thought I would share it here as well.
Designing the Obvious was the book that created my passion for user interface design. Many of the principles within the book drive my thoughts about the tandem of simplicity and user experience. As far as application interface design goes, there is no better book for theory. That said, the information in the book is applicable to all facets of interactive design. The title itself, is pretty self-explanatory (obviously!) and the book makes for a good read, rather than being overly technical.
A must-have for anyone working with front-end design on the internet, Krug’s book has aged particularly well. The examples are in most cases no longer on the internet, but the principles and ideologies are still very relevant. If you don’t own this book and you do any form of web design, you need to at the very least borrow this from the library; though you’ll probably want a copy as your bible. My copy is getting pretty dirty on the covers.
Brendan Dawes is a curious man. Analog In, Digital Out is a book about interaction – sort of. Dawes takes a look at how every day events can be information that can be harnessed to produce designs, and frequently challenges the way we see computers today. The examples in book even include snippets of code to reproduce what he has made. Reading this book opens a new way of abstract thinking. Someone is going to read this one day and create some sort of technological marvel.
This book introduced me to the world of typography. Over time I’ve found that nearly any book on typography repeats the history of type for the first half of the book, and while this one is no exception, it presents it in an interesting manner. The examples and explanations are more manageable than The Elements of Typographic Style and I would highly recommend this as a starting point for those interested in learning more about typography.
Posted in Design, Personal, Typography, Usability, Wordpress | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
When the clock starts rolling around noon and stomachs start rumbling, lunch is on the mind. Delivery orders are placed, and you wait. Well, due to some poor design decisions on the lunch form I waited a long time. Worse yet, I was left disgruntled at the end of the situation, all because of poor form design; I ended up faxing the order form to their phone number.
The problem is pretty simple, but twofold. First, why a lightning bolt for a fax machine icon? Granted, there’s no hard rule about what to use as a fax icon, but this one is pretty suspicious. What’s worse is the layout of the next sentence. Notice that Fax is under the phone icon, and call is under the confusing fax icon. Mix in a bit of a rush and just glancing at the sheet while it’s in a fax tray and you have a recipe for disaster.
If you look even closer you can see the word Fax again underneath itself, and again under the phone icon.
The problem is easily solved, and one could say that putting the phone number in the far right helps increase it’s prominence due to it’s proximity to the edge of the page. A second benefit is that it reinforces the process they want you to follow: fax first, then call.
While the food was late, it was still tasty. I’ve eaten at Potbelly enough to be a repeat customer, so this wasn’t enough to put me off. But think of all the new customers that may never reach the point of repeat customer if they suffer a similar folly? Just another example of why good design pays off.
Anyone else had a similar experience with offline forms? Personally I find it interesting that such mistakes are probably still made in the online world. To be honest, until you’re a victim of such a situation or have someone tell you about it, I’m not sure it’s one of the issues you could catch easily!
Edit: By request I’ve uploaded the full .pdf of the menu for readers. For educational use only!
Posted in Personal, Usability | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
The official Wordpress blog posted up a nice sneak peek into the Wordpress 2.5 release, and intriguingly enough, most of it seems to be an interface update thanks to the fine folks from Happy Cog. Excitedly, I grabbed the release candidate and installed it on my laptop to play with. While the experience was primarily positive, there were some things that irked me. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but the ones that I felt most passionate about are here.
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Posted in Design, Usability, Wordpress, article | 32 Comments »
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
In response to a few comments on ‘My Last Portfolio Sucked, Yours Might Too’ I’ve done some more digging and have come up with a short list of portfolios that I feel cover the right bases. They may not be completely perfect, but if you’re looking for an example of the right direction, hopefully you’ll find it here.
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Posted in Design, Identity, Usability, article | 26 Comments »
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
Last evening I was browsing a few portfolios after having a discussion with a friend who was redoing his own. I have to say it was a frustrating experience just looking through a few. In fact it was so frustrating, this post came as a result. After browsing 200 portfolios and keeping track of certain criteria I know I never want a job in human resources.
At any rate, I hope this will be useful to those of you looking to create or reevaluate your portfolio. Yes I’m an opinionated bloke, but I think you’ll see my reasoning as relatively common sense items that people just overlook.
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Posted in Design, Identity, Usability, article | 76 Comments »
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
I’m sure you’ve read the articles recently posted on A List Apart. Although the issue isn’t exactly breaking news as this methodology has been rumored for a few months. Perhaps the moaning should have begun then as things are likely set in motion and are not likely to stop or change course.
That said, I’ve found myself wondering as I’ve read numerous blog posts about the subject and wondered why some things have yet to be pointed out. Feel free to call me out for being an unrealistic fool.
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Posted in Design, Uncategorized, Usability | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
Every time you venture to a website that gives advice about websites, you’re bound to run into the line “content is king.” In truth, the value of your site is by and large that of your content. Aesthetics and marketing only go so far. People come to a site with a goal, and that goal is always content focused. Yet we seem to often sacrifice this in the name of design.
Our evangelism for semantic code is all in the name of usability, many of us spend time in design critiques or wireframe discussions about the usability of workflows, the proper words to describe a key menu element, or even going to bizarre lengths to keep out that one last wrapper div that we feel we could find a way around. But at the end of all this, we’re using image replacement on header text, and leaving content handling in the hands of the questionable practices of rich-text emulators. Nothing wrong with that, right? It’s a pretty standard practice on the web today.
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Posted in Design, Usability | 5 Comments »
New project created
Creating a new test session
Ready to start a session
Session finished
Exporting Video
The offender? A lightning bolt icon indicating the fax number and some poor ordering
My revised order form
The bowl of chili and sandwich, only 60 minutes later than I had hoped!