Following a tweet link from Smashing, I read a pretty good article by Shanshan Ma on UXmatters discussing the act of Flight Status checking on mobile devices. I’ve excerpted it below but couple of things.
First, interestingly, the article specifically asks for comments, yet (even when signed in) readers are never presented with a comment box. Frankly, I’dve just posted my comments there but now I feel compelled to write here.
Second, relative to the article itself … of all the sites presented, they all stink. The problem with Flight Status checkers is that fundamentally they all use similar methods, similar input tools, to acquire the data. What this means is that you get a screen with several selectors and several free-type inputs. Despite advances in the UI tools for both selectors and typing, they are still fundamentally difficult to use, particularly for situations that many users find themselves in when using these services (in my own case, I found myself driving in 6 inches of unexpected snow in NYC this October and trying to get a JetBlue status).
One of the nicest things about having been in the industry for so long is that I can reminisce and consider technologies that we don’t often see today but that may still have applicability. In this case I am referring to the “deck” principles used in HDML in early versions of phone browsers. The deck principle basically provided that multiple pages of data were transferred with each page call, reducing the number of times callbacks were required and increasing the individual interactivity by allowing data to be shuffled between “cards.” Couple that with good Ajax utilization, and you might have a pretty neat app.
For a good flight status checker to work, think in terms of the actual UI. In my own incident, I needed to not have to enter keyed data – just click and fire with easy-to-hit buttons and less on-screen information. What I propose is something more like this (and I apologize, I sketched this out real quick just now and sent it with my phone cam).
Here you get no more than a couple of selections per screen, always presented as click buttons. The beauty is that you can use Ajax effectively to pre-load all of the subsequent screens with minimal data transfer. For example, by coupling the Location Services data of the current location along with the user selections, you’d likely be able to guess the probable dates and flight numbers (no more than 3 days future, any given airport, within a 6 hour time window, the lookup is no more than about 40 flights).
Another problem I faced was that all of the interactions used POST, which means that it was impossible to go backward and still have the data intact (so I could modify one small bit and try again), forcing me to re-enter 6 fields of data each try. Using the hashtag approach, you’d also allow for backward and forward runs through the history.
Thinking through the user experience is part visualization, part interaction, and part data process and information architecture. Trying to remove any part of the puzzle leaves something to be desired in the final product. Flight status checkers are a great utilization of mobile web, but THINK the process, use it, determine what can be made better, and do it.
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[original article by Gerry McGovern, my commentary here]
Mobile is a platform. It is a tactic, not a strategy. What you need is a strategy for the connected customer.
If a Norwegian man is sitting on the toilet reading the news on his iPhone, is he mobile? Well, research indicates that one of the most favored places where Norwegian men use their phones is on the toilet. iPads are used a lot on the couch but the iPhone is more popular in bed.
Mobile is not necessarily mobile. It is flexible, convenient, fast, and private. Pictures of sexually transmitted diseases are often accessed through mobile devices. This could be because mobile is particularly favored by young people. It could also be because a phone is more private than a computer. A number of people might have access to the computer you use, for example.
I’ve read that mobiles will be used a lot this Christmas, particularly for last minute gifts. That implies that people using them may need advice on what to buy, because by definition they will not be buying for themselves.
“Desktop copywriting must be concise. Mobile copywriting must be even more concise,” Jakob Nielsen writes in his article ‘Mobile UX Sharpens Usability Guidelines.’ We need more than content reeducation according to Jakob. “The feature set should be much smaller for a mobile site than for a desktop site.”
However, the customer is not always in a hurry. Some people read more on their smart phones than they read on websites. So, one of the most important links any mobile website can have is a link back to the main website.
A major weakness of organizations is that they behave reactively rather than strategically. “We need a mobile app.” “We need to be on Twitter.” “We need more video.” “We need to blog.”
Web strategy is far more about psychology than technology, blogs, Twitter or any other forms of content. The more people use the Web to live their lives and do their jobs, the more web professionals need to invest in understanding human behavior. This is because the Web removes the human touch points, the opportunities to observe, the empathy zones.
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OK, maybe not really a true CMS but in working on this project, it was emphasized how important it was to make it simple. One of these days I’ll explain what it was for.
Update: having now left iStreamPlanet, I have no idea what ever happened to this. Originally it was supposed to be for live streaming of Sunday Night Football on iOS & Android via HTML5 but there were severe limitation imposed by the iOS in terms of playlists. We were working with DoubleClick to get through some of the problems (thanks to that team for some nice workarounds) but in the end, iOS prevents skipping to the next item in a live playlist unless the user causes a direct interaction (so no pseudo-actions via Javascript). Nonetheless, before the 4.3 update, it was working. Flawlessly.
By Francisco Inchauste on getfinch.com
Aspiring designers are failing. They are being let down by their schools and sometimes by our design community. In America,creativity is on a decline. The resources available online are massive; Quality content is hard to find.
“I’m eager to hire the next great class of designers, but to my dismay–and the dismay of many young hopefuls who’ve often spent many years and thousands of dollars preparing to enter the industry–I’m finding that the impressive academic credentials of most students don’t add up to the basic skills I require in a junior designer.” — Gadi Amit1
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Image: The Disciplines of User Experience – Kicker Studio
The nature of what we do at iStream frequently calls for systems for internal staff and customers to be able to control content, but not in the traditional sense of things like textual, published data in the sense of a “traditional” CMS such as WordPress or CouchCMS. Instead, our focus is frequently on metadata and media-heavy asset management and event-based structures.
For this reason, my team spends a lot of time architecting, developing and designing custom content management systems. For example, say that you have a customer who needs a system to manage video assets from a conference where there might be multiple playlists comprised of several selected videos, published in multiple formats (ASX, XML, RSS, etc), publishable to unknown or indeterminate media players via syndication and time-manageable. This customer has a very specific need despite the flexibility that the CMS needs to handle.
Frequently developers lose focus of that need – delivering the content – and instead attempt to focus on the flexibility, which in most web shops tends to mean extending the scope into areas that don’t serve the client and increase the turnaround time. What a good project manager needs to bear in mind is that keeping the scope trim, while allowing for future scalability and extensibility, serves your customer and your developer team much better than trying to develop a CMS that does backflips. And it is the PM’s job to sell this to stakeholders. It does not mean that the end result has to be lusterless, devoid of a nice interface or polish. In fact, if anything, trimming the scope to the bare essentials accentuates the need to focus on the details.
I am, to be sure, a bit jaded as my team frequently works on heavily abbreviated schedules – one or two week turnaround times are more often than not the case. So we’ve become accustomed to looking for the streamlined data, reusable components and code, and simplified interfaces. We do back-end a lot with Ajax-to-Web Service exchanges, which is particularly eased with a framework like jQuery. The use of jQuery and the like also provides a step-ladder to support some nice tricks on the front end that give the final result enough polish to make the client smile.
Take for example this system. The client need was born out of the need to publish live event video to a standardized video player. There would be many events and many people using the system so we needed to be sensitive to the amount of data displayed and who was able to see certain things. The video type, because of the RIA player being used, needed to be able to be specified as one of several types, have associated stream metadata, and allow for a number of other content-rich objects such as multiple audio tracks, closed captions, markers, push starts (instruct the player to start at a point other than the first frame during VOD or DVR playback), etc.
The end result is what you see here. There are simply two screens (other than the login) – a dashboard that lists the “events” and an event edit screen. The interface uses a few jQuery UI tools (such as Accordion) to make it sleek and compact, but doesn’t go overboard.
Visual cues and large icons pinpoint missing data or action items, and data is validated on a per-field basis (and of course scrubbed at the SQL point). A single modal popup also provides confirmation of playback in the RIA player before publishing. The authentication system started as a simple “one-user-one-pass” system but was later retro-fitted with a multi-tier system of account-subaccount and admin-and-user privileges system that gives the administrator rights.
I personally use and evangelize using WordPress for a lot of things but for all its greatness, it has also started to become too complex for many people, and I find myself having to spend more and more time instructing clients how to use it rather than focusing on content generation. For MadeByGirl, we ended up producing a custom back-end because it was more specific to our need than packages could provide.
When beginning the process of determining how to manage content, whether it be basic textual content or something else, take the time to consider what will best serve the customer needs. Bigger is not always better, flashy is not always functional. Take care of the need, streamline the design, consider the human-computer interaction aspects and architect a usable system. The ultimate goal is to make the client happy and keep coming back to you (or even better, recommending you).
OK, so roll ahead, here’s the end solution. With a very small amount of very simple jQuery, the player will pop to full screen over the existing page elements, and has instant replay and GO LIVE capabilities when in live mode. The scrubber control in VOD mode is not fluid because seek capability is limited. And wouldn’t you know, volume control and bitrate metering for m3u8 segmented dynamic video is not supported on iPad at all (thanks Ken Hanson for helping me out of the frustration and leading me back in the right direction).
iStreamPlanet HTML5 Video for iPad solution with dynamic stream capabilityMy efforts to keep updating the progress failed – deadlines and classes thwarted me to death, but hopefully I’ll catch up one of these days. In any case, I had to revise the HTML a bit and add in the jQuery…without giving away the farm, here’s some of it. (more…)
[by Steven Snell at Smashing Magazine]
Communication is one of the foundational elements of a good website. It is essential for a positive user experience and for a successful website that truly benefits its owners. All types of websites are affected by the need for good communication in one way or another. Regardless of whether the website in question is an e-commerce website, a blog, a portfolio website, an information website for a service company, a government website or any other type of website, there is a significant need to communicate effectively with visitors.
Because of the significance of communication with visitors, it is an essential consideration for every designer and website owner and the responsibility of both. Unfortunately, communication is sometimes overlooked and takes a backseat to the visual attractiveness of a website. Ideally, the design and other elements that do the communicating work together to create a clear, unified message to visitors.
In this article, we’ll take a broad look at the subject of clear communication in Web design. We’ll start with a discussion of the primary methods of communication for websites and typical challenges that designers face. From there, we’ll move on to look at what specifically should be communicated to visitors and tips for implementing this in your own work. At the end, we’ll look at some of the goals that should be established in terms of communication when developing websites, as well as some of the results of having a website that communicates effectively.
[read the entire article at Smashing Magazine]