Usability

The buzz around Pinterest has been around for a while now but what are the attraction and the purpose of the new social network?

Mashable’s beginner’s guide is a good place to start for an overview; however with most things the best way is to just to try it out. I’ve been a member for less than a week and have played around and wondered about what to add? Suddenly, an hour had past and my ‘boards’ began to fill up; but how and why?

The first emotional hook is the intrigue in applying for an invitation to the ’exclusive’ group; a little buzz being accepted and then the realisation that you have an empty profile -plus a potential audience of over 11 million (The Realtime Report)

Secondly, Pinterest helps by suggesting titles for your boards. I like to call them “mood boards”. It’s nice to have a starting point. Pinterest will even sign you up automatically to ‘follow’ people; a manageable number that you can check out an ‘unfollow’ if they don’t suit you. So, what will your boards be filled with?

Personally, I think about what interests me as time is short and I have so much to ‘pin’. Over time it will develop and grow, so why am I bothering? It’s like a record of my life in a non threatening way. I have confidence in my interests, there’s nothing to hide, and it’s enjoyable to share and see what others are interested in – all in pictures!

A recent gripe is that a number of websites I’ve wanted to pin either don’t have large enough images to show or any images to show at all, which is a shame. It makes the search to pin an interest take much longer. Interestingly, ecommerce sites have seen a huge increase in their revenue. It’s a genius way of promoting products by using the most reliable source – word of mouth!

The user experience of Pinterest is excellent. The ease of use and the fact that it’s hugely engaging makes it something that we will be using more and more in the future. -Organaising events,-sharing interesting landmarks,-various collections and even videos; Pinterests’ options are endless and exciting.

There’s so much more to say, but really interested in your views. Please comment below.

Having read a fair bit about ‘Apple reinventing the textbook’  and having watched the launch, I don’t think anyone can say for certainty which way this will go; beyond those raised by the Econsultancy blog (which missed the bit about Apple’s publishing partners talking about iBooks)  There are a number of points to note:

• Anything that makes textbooks more interesting can only be a good thing. However, is it possible to turn every book into an amazing visual journey. I notice they only showed introductory science book examples. How complex can the topics become before the book reverts to mainly text? What about drier subjects like some branches of mathematics?
• Does this risk trivialising learning? They’ve taken the study questions and made them more interactive. Fine, but this is just like any web based learning environment, so not exactly revolutionary. And not everything can be represented as a multiple-choice question. It would have been great to see more innovative approaches to learning. Without this, there is a risk that the reinforcement of learning is only very shallow.
• Immersion. There are lots of potential distractions on an iPad. Just how effective will it be as a teaching tool.
• Reading experience. iPads are not e-Ink displays, which means that they will be tiring to read over time. People seem to cope with this, but if kids are looking at a screen solidly for 5 days a week, I’m not sure that’s amazing for their eyes.
• Typing. Nobody is going to claim that an iPad makes a great tool for typing for long periods. The problem is, if a school invests in iPads for each student, then they’re not going to provide laptops too. So what are students going to use to do coursework while at school?
• Exclusion. I echo the sentiment about this being too expensive for most schools/students. It would have been nice if the iBooks format was slightly more open, so it could perhaps work via a browser for those schools that couldn’t afford iPads. This is not in Apple’s interests though, hardware sales are where all their profits are (and why they can make the entire iBooks platform free software. You need an iPad to view it and a Mac to create it).
• Reach. As the article states, cost aside, not all schools will want to move onto an entirely Apple ecosystem. I’m not sure this matters to Apple though and I don’t think they’ll be worried if they only carve out a small niche in the education market. For one it’s great publicity for how socially responsible they are, it also helps to cement use of Apple products into the next generation of consumers and it will drive sales from those wealthy schools that can afford it. Now they’ve made the software, there are no major costs to supporting it (even interactive books are likely to be less costly to host and serve than apps, music or video as they will be smaller files prone to lower levels of demand).

So, there are limitations, but it is likely to see success within those schools that can afford to adopt it. Just don’t expect to see it revolutionise education overnight.

This year, Amazon.com has brought Black Friday over the Atlantic to introduce rapid-fire bargains to our green and pleasant .co.uk domain.

For those of us who, like me, have never heard of Black Friday, Amazon explain that the name might come from retailers seeing their balance sheets move into the black in the final quarter of trading.  Whatever the history, as far as online retail is concerned it’s all about the search for bargains.

The reason that Amazon are at the forefront of the Black Friday buzz is that they have turned the hunt for deals into a race.

Their site counts down to the start of each new deal to whet your appetite.  Only when the timer hits zero is the percentage discount revealed.  Stocks are limited and with some expensive electronics discounted at over 50% off, the competition is fierce.

A comment on one news article suggests that some customers have gone so far as to download a bleeding edge developer version of the Chrome browser to shave extra milliseconds off of the page load times.  Every little helps when you and your mouseclicking trigger finger are in a duel to the death.

As the shopping experience migrates more and more to the online realm, retailers know that their sites sink or swim based on their checkout process.  The old maxim ‘make it easy for the customer to buy’ is all about the design and usability of a sites product and checkout pages.

Amazon however, are taking this to the next level.  They’re asking their customers to race each other for the privilege of buying!  If that’s the game they’re going to ask their customers to play then the checkout process had better be slick, intuitive and problem free.  Alternatively, those bargains had better be as good as the hype from America would have us believe.

I’ve been thinking about this for a little while and it seems to me that, love it or hate it, Apple and more specifically the iPhone has fundamentally changed the user experience (UX) industry. In this case I’m not talking about the shift to a more mobile device way of thinking, but more to the shift in perception it caused towards the user experience of products. As an industry we’ve never looked back.

Late 2006…

Before the iPhone, the smartphone was a very capable device in terms of functionality, yet the user experience of interacting with these phones was often somewhat poor. Considering that phones like the Nokia N95 or the Blackberry Pearl were thought to be the pinnacle of mobile devices. Perfectly functional phones, but try using one today after using a modern touchscreen.

At the same time, the web user experience was advancing, but it was always a hard battle for the benefits of UX to be acknowledged. We spent so much time justifying why UX was important and when allowed to help were often limited in what we could alter.

To us as practitioners, the benefits of UX are obvious, but the problem is when talking to engineers or decision makers the benefits are distant and abstract. If the solution you have works, why spend the time to make it vastly better?

I now have an iPhone in my hand

However, if you’ve experienced a great user experience, you start to see why it’s so important. The exclusivity of the iPhone to one network operator and the reluctance of corporate IT to let it be used in enterprise slowed its penetration into business, but once decision makers had experienced a well thought through and seamless user experience (iTunes aside), the case for UX became so much easier to make.

First the iPhone, then Android, which sought to reflect what made the iPhone so successful. Android then put an average to good user experience (version and handset manufacturer dependent) into the mass market, raising the bar for interaction expectation. Today, terms like user experience and usability are common in product reviews. The tech press has got the message and even some of the mainstream press. Now that we’re surrounded by better user experiences, people won’t settle for good enough and businesses cannot rest on their laurels.

But what if there hadn’t been an iPhone?

The big question is, would someone else have created something as good? Let’s take a look:

The then market leader Nokia had never managed to master the end to end experience (Ovi desktop applications were painful to use and not in any way integrated). They were also in thrall to the carriers who imposed their own, sub-par, handset customisations in the hope of creating/enforcing customer loyalty. Generally this tended to undo any of Nokia’s good work in creating a clean and usable UI. Nokia’s touchscreen attempts were average, but perhaps when capacitive touch came along they may have created something as smooth as an iPhone or top end Android phone (in reality it took them 3 years to even come close). Of everyone at the time, they had the vision and the research and development capacity to make it happen. I really hope things pick up for them.

If not Nokia, then perhaps a major internet leader might have stepped in. So, without the iPhone would Google have created Android? Probably. Supposedly Android was already in development when the iPhone came out. How much its eventual form owes to the iPhone is a great question (although it is interesting to see Apple borrowing Android style notifications, it’s not all one way traffic). Based on Google’s track record it wouldn’t have been a slick and painless experience though. Mass market is what we’d be aiming for, to get a great user experience in everybody’s hand. The trouble is, Google designs for techies, not consumers. The current version of Android is pretty good, but earlier versions were not so solid. The reason it sells well is because it’s good enough and it’s not as expensive as an Apple product. As an aside, it’s interesting to see how we think so much less about technical specifications of handsets and more about the software they run and the experience they provide. We’re not free of jargon by a long way, but I’m gratified to see that we talk more now about capabilities than processors. Based on their adverts though, Google still hasn’t totally got this.

Then of course there is the other software behemoth, Microsoft. They had already produced their own mobile OS, which could be found on a number of different handset models (most successfully HTCs). However, Windows Mobile was stylus dependent, somewhat slow and had an extremely painful web browsing experience. Everything I’ve read about Microsoft suggests that they would have happily continued down the stylus route, unless provided with a good reason to change.

If we couldn’t count on the software makers, would any of the hardware manufacturers have created anything compelling? Samsung and HTC are the obvious candidates here. HTC has been very good at customising others’ operating systems and Samsung have been pressing ahead with their Bada platform. It’s possible, but looking at their handsets pre-iPhone, they weren’t heading in that direction all that quickly.

Finally, we shouldn’t forget the network operators, who have so much power when it comes to actually getting products into consumers’ hands. Critically Apple wrested control of the experience from them. This was a pivotal moment, as traditionally the carriers have been somewhat lacking when it comes to developing software and UIs. I can’t be certain, but I suspect that without this, we would not have seen a great mobile phone experience, as it would always have been disjointed. Vodafone was probably the most progressive in this regard, but could never totally nail it.

So where would we have been?

Without a great user experience in most people’s hands, expectations would be lower for both consumers and businesses (I know mine were), the case for change would be that much harder to make and we would be putting together slideshows about the ROI of Usability. We’d still have been there, we’d still have been making things better, but let’s face it, it’s much easier when you don’t have to push on the door, but are instead welcomed in.

Thank you Apple. You aren’t right all the time, but looking back, it’s clear just how much of a game changer the iPhone was.

Hands up if you enjoy the retail changing room experience. Hands up if you buy clothes online.

Thought so – and so have a host of other people. There have been two approaches to this – one of which I blogged about earlier which is trying to improve the online experience by using virtual mannequins based on your measurements. Hawes & Curtis has now implemented it and in fact the same company has now released a female form.
The other approach is to set about improving the off-line experience – the dreaded retail changing room.

The latest innovation in the field is the virtual mirror. Possibly the first major retailer to implement a version of this was Macy’s in New York City, who trialled a virtual mirror about a year ago for a limited time. The Magic Fitting Room was set up in the dressing room area and featured a body-length mirror along with an iPad tablet. The shopper stepped in, a photo was taken to calibrate position and body orientation. They could enter their Facebook log-in information, an e-mail address or a mobile phone number on the iPad then browse a (rather limited) selection of tops, bottoms, dresses and jackets. On selecting an item, a digital representation of it appeared on the mirror, superimposed upon the reflection of the shopper as if she were actually trying it on. When they are done, shoppers could share the look via e-mail or Facebook to see what their friends thought. They could also receive a text message or Facebook post indicating the location of these items in the store. “Reaching out to and engaging with the digital-savvy, young consumer is something all retailers are striving to do,” said Joe Feczko, Macy’s senior vice president for innovation.

That’s all well and good – but having gone through this virtual try, you still had to traipse through the store to find the item on the racks and probably try it on for real just to make sure (assuming it was in stock, that is). Not exactly a time saver then.

Style me  has also come up with an interactive virtual mirror, slated to appear in stores sometime next year. It is not meant to replace the changing room but rather augment it or enhance it. After the system calibrates your body size and shape while you stand still a few seconds, the user standing in front of the mirror can browse by brand or clothing item the same way they would with a Kinect (e.g. swiping the air to turn a page, hand hovering over an icon on the screen rather than touching it). The next thing is to try it on virtually – so the item appears “on” you. You can then save, take a picture to share by email or on Facebook, and decide if you want to actually try on or not. It’s an opportunity to share a laugh with your friends, they say. Really?…

I can see quite a few things “wrong” with this. For one, this comes across to me as a “digital savvy young consumer” approach to shopping – an afternoon out with your friends, you try on a lot of things – some quite unlikely – have a giggle, post a funny pic on Facebook. For grown ups, the perspective of standing in the middle of the shop floor virtually trying on clothes probably does not appeal so much – nor do I know many adult women (let alone men) who shop with friends all that much or who have the time, especially those with children, to virtually try on a bunch of things before deciding which to take into the changing room. And if I have to do this in the privacy of the changing room I might as well be trying the clothes on anyway.

I also seriously doubt that calibrating by just standing a few seconds in front of the mirror will provide an accurate enough body image – you still need to try the item on for fit. While I see the sense of having an online virtual me based on my measurements (see above, fit.me) to help online ordering, I suspect the technology is still not sharp enough to make it reliable enough in helping select a size. The one technology which currently seems to offer real benefits in this area is the Intellifit system which actually scans your body to tell you what size and model to buy.

Other companies doing similar things:

Using Kinect:

TC2

Glasses to You

Frames Direct 

Finally, what about men? Would they use this?…

As part of my conversation with Mike Dewar, data scientist with Bitly, we discussed data visualisation. One of the challenges in dealing with large quantities of data is making sense of it, and then communicating the important aspects of the set– telling the data’s story. One way of doing this is by creating graphs and infographics to highlight the important points. Sometimes, though, to make the story clear one has to compromise the scientific accuracy of the graph – meaning, telling a story that people will understand may come in direct conflict with the “proper”, scientific way of presenting the data. Does it matter?

Arguably it depends who you are talking to. Depending on your audience, the scientific way may not necessarily be the best way. Many lay people have little idea of how to interpret a graph, after all and what will really matter to them is the story and whether the graph helps make it visually clear or perhaps memorable. They will not even notice whether the right type of graph and scale was used or not. In user experience terms, making something – a web site, an application – usable may well means sacrificing a feature that only a small number of power users would even consider using.

An illustration of this is that a recent post on the Bitly blog was picked up by people all over the Internet because the story it told resonated and the graph seemed to put it in a nutshell. The post was about the “half-life” of links, which is the idea that different links will generate different levels of attention. In this post a further assumption is made: that a link’s potential for generating attention depends on the site or platform where it is first seen and clicked on. In other words, a link on Twitter may have a shorter life span than one on a blog. The graph below compares how long a link “lives” online on different social media platforms: this graph is the one that was picked up yet from a purely scientific point of view, the axes’ scales are probably not the clearest they could have been.

Does it matter? Not really: the overall picture it provides is accurate and illustrates in one neat package what the blog is saying, which is that links on Twitter or Facebook are much shorter lived that links on YouTube.

The conclusion is familiar to us at Foviance and applies here as well: you can’t be all things to all people, you need to understand your customers and create an engaging experience for them.

Recent talk in the blogsphere suggests that the debate about user experience (UX) and creativity rumbles on. As a UX Researcher who believes strongly in good design, I thought I’d pitch in with my thoughts.

What I want to establish is that UX is not a hindrance to innovation or creativity, but something that should complement these pursuits. The problem seems to be that there is extreme polarisation in some quarters regarding a user centric approach. Some believe it to be the solution to everything, in effect giving the user the pen and asking them to draw the solution. Others believe it to be the antithesis of everything design and a complete block to creativity. In reality it should be neither, the key is to choose the right research for the right situation.

When working to enhance an existing concept or creating the next version of a product or service, traditional user centred design (UCD) works superbly. It’s what it’s designed for after all. Understand the current marketplace, understand business needs, understand user needs, create, evaluate, refine, repeat, launch and continually evolve. This is the bulk of what most organisations need from their UX engagements. It is of course a little more complex than this is practice as we must consider all channels a customer might engage with and ensure the best possible end to end experience, which inevitably involves some level of organisational change as well. However, the UCD method holds true throughout this.

Where things are a little more challenging is when UX meets innovation. Great innovators, like Steve Jobs or James Dyson, would contend that research with users does not lead to innovation. There is some truth to this; a focus group would have been unlikely to have designed an iPad or Dyson AirBlade. A survey wouldn’t have identified the need for Facebook. What you see with each of these products is where someone with uncanny insight addresses a latent need. Be it the ability to surf the web in an eminently immersive and pleasurable fashion, the ability to pursue a greater level of social connectedness or even the ability to experience dry hands after using a public toilet.

The trouble is that even for great innovators, these moments of great insight are rare. Mark Zuckerberg has arguably only had the one good idea, but executed and evolved it extremely well. James Dyson has created two or three revolutionary products. Steve Jobs’ genius was to take existing ideas and through an exemplary focus on the end to end user experience turn them into something so much better. What you’ll notice is that all of these extremely successful innovators relied upon insight, their own insight and their own empathy for users of their products. I salute their success, they’ve changed the way we experience the world, which is quite amazing.

However, for every other organisation this approach does rather rely on being fortunate enough to employ an amazing designer who completely understands their audience, has correctly guessed what they want and is prepared to tailor his creativity to suit their needs. This is where UX Research comes in. Contextual research methods such as ethnography or well facilitated creative workshops can lend great insight into users’ needs and provide designers with the information they need to create innovative products and services. And once they’ve created these products, we’ll be there to help them evolve and refine them. We’ll even help them to determine the emotional impact their products have.

We’re in this together. UX professionals are here to empower creative people and user focused organisations to deliver excellent experiences that delight their customers.

Whilst trying to find a coat online last week, it occurred to me how online fashion retail is still not very customer centric, despite the huge rise in online clothes shopping over the past few years.

I often don’t have a clear picture in my mind of what I want, just generally two specific things; what type of item (skirt/top/dress…) and what I need the item for (work/daytime/evening…) I do know what styles I like (classic/glamorous/urban…) and possibly thanks to Gok Wan, my shape (hourglass/apple/athletic…)

However, when I arrive on most fashion websites I feel overwhelmed by the choice and generally find myself trawling through endless pages of unsuitable items, and then giving up. Part of the reason for this, is that the filters provided do not help me narrow down the items using criteria that I actually have in mind. This is because, more often than not, the filters are based on the direct properties of the item (colour, brand, size) as opposed to the personal categories that users search by (purpose, style, shape.)

Adapting the filters like this could help users to find suitable items more easily, and, once reading about the items, I think that there is also scope for additional product information to help inform the buying decision. This could be things such as:

• Different ways to wear the item
• How the item looks on different sizes/shapes
• What others who previously bought the item think of it.

One website that takes a novel approach to shoe retail is stylistpick. Users are asked a series of questions about their fashion preferences before they are presented with a selection of shoes each month that the website thinks will suit them. I actually found that this narrowed the choice too much as there is no way to see all products, or re-do the style quiz if you need something for a different type of occasion. Although it’s not perfect it’s great to see new approaches being used.

The lack of customer centricity generally seen, surprises me given the size of the market, physical diversity of  people shopping and disposable incomes that many people have these days. Whilst I know that people’s clothes selection is very personal, I’m sure that there are others out there who wouldn’t mind a few more recommendations to help find the right thing. So, come on fashion websites, help me spend my money!