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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Original by Paul Boag (founder of UK design shop Headspace) for Smashing Magazine
Here’s a question for you: would you agree that creating a great user experience should be the primary aim of any Web designer? I know what your answer is… and youʼre wrong!
Okay, I admit that not all of you would have answered yes, but most probably did. Somehow, the majority of Web designers have come to believe that creating a great user experience is an end in itself. I think we are deceiving ourselves and doing a disservice to our clients at the same time.
The truth is that business objectives should trump users’ needs every time. Generating a return on investment is more important for a website than keeping users happy. Sounds horrendous, doesn’t it? Before you flame me in the comments, hear me out.
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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).
Khoi Vinh (subtraction.com), former Design Director at New York Times, speaking at “FRIETAG am Donnerstag,” a breakfast lecture series in Zurich about his experiences at the position, which he left 2 months ago, and the failures of the industry to see how important the issue of user experience is in this digital age and in thinking that the traditional model of distribution is the problem. The video was put together by Tina Roth Eisenberg (swissmiss.com). Love the quote:
“Great journalism is its own justification! But great journalism is not a substitute for great user experience.”
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Any student of UX or UCD should know about “the myth of the average user.” There is no such thing – we learn that early on. What we don’t often talk about is some of the things that we share in common. While we spend time worrying about target audiences and their interests, there are still some things we can generalize about most users.
Tonight I delivered a lecture to my Web Concepts class at UNLV – second time delivering the same lecture – but for some reason I was struck by my own words and reminded that we sometimes lose sight of the fundamentals of living life in an age of the Web. The lecture topic was about how users influence Web design in terms of characteristics of modern life. A lot of these ideas were thrown together from a range of UX gurus – Garrett, Krug, Nielsen – but I think this list really says it all.
We don’t read, we scan assimilate
Krug says we scan, meaning we only glance through text content looking for words and colors that jump out at us. Through Nielsen’s eye tracking studies we know that most users don’t fixate on any specific part of a page for very long and that eyes follow similar patterns across web pages, frequently focusing on very selective areas.
In addition, scanning increases speed and efficiency, and it’s frequently influenced by personal choices and behaviors such as selection of monitor size, how large we make browser windows, whether we zoom, do we scroll, and so on. (Scrolling, incidentally, is a topic for a whole other post.)
Modern man…impatience at it’s finest
Modern life, with all its technology, speed, and information has done little to improve our lives other than to inundate us with so muchstuff that we have to do everything fast. I, myself, fall into this category – trying to hold down 4 jobs, school, volunteer work and what little social life that leaves me. So I know that what I get out of it is an huge amount of impatience.
With all this stuff to do, to look at, to deal with, we’ve become an impatient society. Fast food, increased speed limits, convenience stores – it seems like everything our lives are hurtling faster and faster. But with regard to our users, why not use this to our advantage? Let’s take this list of character traits as a starting point:
So what does this mean for user experience? Can we successfully make our sites like a 7-11 store where we can find any suitable product or opinion or data quickly and easily? If so, it would lend itself to meeting the demands of modern man.
Ultimately the goal of many web sites is to make money. Period. A web site is a business, or at least a really small version of one. Unless we’re pushing captive audience live video or we’re Facebook and can keep our users engaged on a single web page for hours, it is unlikely that we can keep eyes on the page for very long.
And a few quandaries
And of course there’s always the quirks of modern life. Once again, a list:
I relate the intuition question to the guy who refuses to ask for directions and would rather drive for hours than swallow his pride. For some reason, even in our own personal space without any repercussion, we tend to continue down the path we think is right rather than double back and refocus. Crazy. The question for an experience designer is…how can we redesign navigation to help guide the user?
Reviews – we all read them, we sometimes believe them, and yet we follow them. And serendipity – well, there is that quirk of life that we actually like to stumble onto things. I myself love StumbleUpon because it’s just friggin’ fun to find crap.
So the question is – what can we do to improve the experience of our web site for the impatient user? Can you, in fact, use this to your advantage? Would love to hear any stories….
Right now, usability and user experience are all the rage, in the same way that Web 2.0 was several years back. I (used to) teach a series on User Centered Design where the focus is on the progression of design and development to create engaging and communicative web sites (re: J.J. Garrett).
But as I continue to get the hundreds of Twitter posts with links to all these articles, it becomes increasingly clear that there is a big difference between USABILITY and USER EXPERIENCE that we seem to gloss over, and maybe even use interchangeably. While ideally they are similar, they are not the same thing.
Usability, in design, describes the ease in which people can employ or use an object to achieve a goal. This means that they get from start to finish with minimal difficulty, using intuition and minimal heuristics. In a narrow context, that might be something akin to completing a purchase on an online store.
User experience, however, describes the emotions and feelings attached to that interaction, including perceptions, affectations, subjective influence and so forth. Some consider usability to be part of user experience, just as information architecture and graphic design might be, but I think that functional aspects of usability, while lending itself to the experience as a whole, don’t drive it, in the same way that our feelings don’t improve the usability of something.
Within the same narrow context of an online purchase, take this example. Suppose we have an online store and we’ve designed every field, every piece of copy, and every interaction to make purchasing fast and with minimal thoughts and actions on the user’s part. However, let’s say the email confirmation doesn’t list an itemization of the purchase so the user is left bewildered. In this case, all the usability in the world didn’t end with a good user experience (necessarily).
I’ve seen and built tons of media (video) players, which all suffer the very same – many have complete usability but terrible user experience, while others are the exact opposite. Visual design is certainly not an excuse for user experience, and definitively not for usability. Visual design should be a means of conveying and improving those aspects.
The point is that in our drive to improve the design and use of our sites, consider that the two are completely worlds apart, even if there are many aspects that are intertwined. When testing, segregate the ideas of usability (in terms of performance of task) and user experience (how did we feel about it) and build both into the test pattern.