The Things I Will Miss

• The unfettered creativity of students whose minds have not been destroyed by the realities of life
• Intelligent questions that even make me think
• Students who bother to challenge my opinion (or even better, a methodology)
• The thanks from the one student each semester who tells me that something they learned helped them get their first job or changed their mind about [insert topic here]

Things I Won’t Miss

• Students who think I don’t know that they’re on Facebook (and those of you in INF400, yea, we did hack your passwords)
• Blank stares, the head nods (despite being good for comedy relief)
• Fluff.  (Please, if you’re a student and reading this, a quick word of advice – answer succinctly or just admit you don’t know)
• Superficial essays. (See above – do your [expletive] research – there is such a thing as a library)
• Lack of effort, especially on exams (I mean, please, if you ASK me for true-false and multiple-choice, then you should get at least better than 50% correct, and even more so when I tell you how many question on each topic and mark my slide sets with the important slides)

Anyway, I say maybe because there’s still a chance I might be returning for INF400 Web Security but not likely.  So to those students who at least appeared eager that I would be back for one more round before UNLV shuts the doors on Informatics forever, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you but keep at it and don’t be afraid to email me if you have questions.

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.

The article…

The Design and Display of Simple Interactions on Mobile Devices

By Shanshan Ma [November 21, 2011] on UXmatters.com

Users visit mobile sites not only to consume content, but to get things done. Let’s take air travel as an example: tasks that users often find themselves performing on an airline company’s mobile site include checking flight status, checking in for a particular flight, and searching for and booking a flight. How does mobile user interface design support task completion? What are the optimal ways of communicating and displaying interactions on mobile sites? With the aim of discovering optimal ways of designing simple interactions on mobile devices, I examined the task of checking flight status. I’m hoping that my analysis sheds some light on this topic.

The Interaction: Checking Flight Status

Travelers can initiate a status check for a flight by locating the flight using its departure date, plus either the flight number or the departure and arrival city or airport for the flight. Sounds simple enough, right? Analyzing this task, here are the steps that are involved in checking flight status:

• Step 1—Decide whether to check flight status using a flight number ordeparture or arrival cities.
• Step 2—If using a flight number, type the flight number; if the departure city and arrival city, type the names of the departure and arrival cities or their airport codes.
• Step 3—Type a flight date.
• Step 4—Submit the form.

It’s fairly easy to support this task on the Web. Simply present both options on a Web page, and users can proceed according to the information they have about the flight—whether flight number ordeparture and arrival cities. While it’s easier to type a flight number than city names or airport codes, users tend to remember flight cities better than airport codes or flight numbers. However, there are a few interesting details that you should consider:

• Which question should you ask first: flight date or flight number or flight cities?
• Which option should you present first: flight number or flight cities?
• Should you ask for the flight date twice to ensure a complete workflow regardless of whether a user is checking the status of a flight by flight number or flight cities or airport codes?

Here’s a post on MSDN by Rob Mauceri with more details…

I’ll let you check out the rather extensive method and event list, but be assured that the things we really like about jQuery – the $(selector), the quick data methods, and several events for data handling – are all there.  Plus there’s several plugins to tack on more methods and events without the total KB package jQuery sits on right now.

On the flip side, if we could just get everyone to DL the .js from the same source URL (such as //ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.0/jquery.min.js) and reinforce caching, we wouldn’t have as much problem anyway.

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.

There is so much we learn when we are physically in the presence of our customers. If I were hiring a web professional the greatest attribute I would look for is empathy; the ability and desire to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. A web professional should have a service heart.

What are Norwegian men doing with their smart phones when they are on the toilet? What do people typically do when they are on the couch? Do the tasks change when they get into bed?

Read the original article and other good stuff from GM here.

My thoughts are that this is more or less semantics. GM is right and wrong.  Mobile is a platform. And it’s also a strategy. They go hand in hand, but it depends on the target audience and their needs.  A good example is YouVersion‘s Bible app (available on pretty much every platform under the sun).  I’ve been using the app from several updates back (about 18 months now) and it’s gotten progressively better and better, not only from a content standpoint but also in it’s delivery. Note that the content isn’t copywriting in this case – the Bible is the Bible (at least in whatever version(s) one likes to read).

The feature set, however, is pretty much the same on both the desktop and phone/device systems. What differentiates the app is the delivery – well designed and heuristically easy to figure out.  And for the most part, I’m not in a hurry when I use it.

Fast forward to this week when I offered to help my church fix their suffering web site (which I will be writing about over the next few weeks).  One proposal is to improve the mobile presence, and yes, it is part strategy and part platform simply because what we use each for will differ.  The web site one would use for basic information, which the mobile would largely be for contemporaneous and updated event information and social connectivity.  Two different needs, significantly different physical presence limitation and likely different user groups.  So sometimes we do have to look at the device as a platform and not just a strategy, but without the strategy there’s no point to the platform either.

And just a note, as of this writing, this blog has no (good) mobile presence or strategy.  I’ll get to it one of these days.  When my wife asked why I don’t hold off (re-)launching until I had it all in place, my response was “why wait?”  Is there a point to holding off?  If I had 10K visitors a day like she does, I could see it, but the small handful of people who might actually read this are highly unlikely to do it on your iPhone (or Android) so I’m pretty much not worried.

I got a lot of new stuff to talk about – most of which revolves around my decision to leave iStreamPlanet after 10 years (and 3 weeks). My experience at iStream was incredible at the very least.  From sitting on a milk crate in a tiny room with 2 other guys, trying to build solutions for clients who had no idea what DRM was, much less why they needed it, then 9 years later seeing the company get its first round of multi-million $ funding from Intel Development Corp.

In June I decided to join up with Reality Engineering, a small but stable software and content provider for dental patient education who’d moved their development operations to Las Vegas.  The CEO, Lee Allen, is one part visionary, one part realist, one part salesman, and ten parts passion and it’s that passion that grabbed me.  It hasn’t been all chocolate and roses, but in just five short months, we’ve managed to put together a fantastic team, get the new, streamlined version of the core product out the door, and get started implementing a scrum environment.

I’ll talk more about it in the next few months.  I’m still teaching at UNLV and still doing a few freelance gigs (now that I’m in senior management, I didn’t want my skills to get rusty), but in the same time, Jen’s MadeByGirl and her new Cocoa & Hearts businesses have both taken off like a rocket, so I’ve had to spend a lot of time working on that too.

So obviously my blog has changed.  Yea, part of the drive crash left me with a frustrated effort to rebuild both content and template so I decided to scrap all the teaching materials I used to have posted, refocus on the blog, and re-build a new theme.  This one is a variation that uses concepts from Shaken Grid Lite but I suspect I’ll change quite a bit more of it over the next few weeks so it’s going to be a “UX-work-in-progress” for a bit.

So I’m back.  Yea, I’m back.  And I’m not so grumpy anymore.

Outside of the craziness that is iStreamPlanet with a couple of high profile gigs and a lot of cross-platform and mobile development, I’m focusing on doing more freelance work, particularly in the blog arena and WordPress as site development.  With 10 jobs in the hopper right now, should be a good year.  The biggest releases recently were Shop Cococozy and Cocoa & Hearts which are both off and running with a bang.

Congrats to the early-bird-exam-takers in my INF400 class who averaged over 90% on the final (last year, the average was below 82%) – nice job!  Good luck to those taking it on the 9th.

In the meantime, here’s a few good articles and resources to read if you’re ramping up to HTML5, CSS3, mobile (particularly iOS), eComm and blog development.

• Everything you wanted to know about touch icons
• iOS UI Human Interface Guidelines (the PDF version)
• Fundamental Guidelines of E-Commerce Checkout Design
• Using HTML5 Semantic Elements Today
• UX is 90% Desirability

And in really kickass news, jQuery 1.6 was released yesterday….woot!

hough the methods used to gather website traffic statistics call into question the validity of the stats themselves, the fact is that some of your website’s visitors will have JavaScript disabled.

You could divide your traffic sources into four broad categories: search engines, mobile visitors, visitors using screen readersand visitors who have JavaScript turned off.

When planning your information architecture and design, you must figure out how to deal with these special groups.

I have assembled a few recent real-world scenarios to find clarity on the issue.

When you want to hide lengthy content behind an animated scroller, or rotate through products or testimonials in sequence, or present categorized page-level content cleanly, you could use accordions, carousels or any other imaginative solution.

If you keep up with JavaScript best practices or use any of the myriad of JavaScript libraries, you are probably already familiar with unobtrusive JavaScript, which is the technique of presenting JavaScript interactivity only when JavaScript is enabled.

This principle should be extended to presentation as well: build your dynamic feature(s) and set your display and visibility values only after the document is ready and only if the visitor has JavaScript enabled, rather than set the properties in your HTML code or define them server-side.

As a major (ab)user of jQuery use, and despite years of UX/UI design, I admit that I rarely think about this possibility – I think we all pretty much assume Javascript is available.  And as we move onto mobile platforms, the disparity of choice and engines is higher and higher.  In any case, if you’ve ever found yourself in this boat, read this article (in its entirety) here for some great solutions to common problems…

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.

The Harsh Reality

Letʼs begin with the harsh truth. If an organization does not believe that it will generate some form of a return on an investment (financial or otherwise), then it should not have a website. In other words, if the website doesn’t pay its way, then we have not done our jobs properly.

Despite what we might think, our primary aim is to fulfill the business objectives set out by our clients. Remember that creating a great user experience is a means to this end. We do not create great user experiences just to make users happy. We do so because we want them to look favorably on the website and take certain actions that will generate the returns that our clients want.

User Experience Is Important

Let me be clear. Iʼm not suggesting that user experience is unimportant. In fact, I believe that creating an amazing experience is the primary means of helping a website fulfill its business objectives. A well-designed website makes it easy for users to complete the calls to action we have created.

Happy users also provide many other benefits. They can become advocates for your website. A happy user is considerably more likely to recommend your services and is more patient when things occasionally go wrong. Enthusiastic users can also become valuable volunteers; they have innumerable ideas about how your website and products can be improved. They are far more valuable than any focus group!

The point, though, is that happy users generate a return on investment, so spending the time and effort to give them a great experience is worth it.

As you can see, this is an amazing piece with a lot of insight.  Read the rest of the article here at Smashing …

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.