Urban Usability

Urban Usability Blog Update

2006-11-19T09:07:00.000-05:00

I have been very busy at work, where I use UCD principles to product manage usability and accessibility offerings for a mobile communications device manufacturer, and simply won't have time to continue this blog.

For those still interested in my ghetto-geek brand of musings, please note that I am starting a new blog devoted completely to my goal of getting back into shape. The blog is called SuperFreak and and will be more like a blogumentary that chronicles every step of my journey to a fitter me.

You can find the blog at http://superfreak.wordpress.com.

Gartner Charges for Accessibility

2006-10-19T22:18:00.000-05:00

While the term 'accessibility' refers to the level to which system interaction is enabled for users with varying levels of abilities/disabilities, the research firm Gartner thinks otherwise. According to their Accessibility website, which is designed to support Section 508, Gartner mirrors information on a data-centric web site and restricts access to paying customers only after customers ask for access rights nicely.

There are two major issues with Gartner's Accessibility strategy:

Dual infrastructure - Creating virtual mirrors of data is a monumental waste of IT resources, especially when Cascading Style Sheets exist.
Accessibility for a Fee - The notion of limiting the availability of accessible information to only those who are Gartner subscribed customers is morally reprehensible and conflicts with the underlying ideology of accessibility.

Unbelievable. For more information, feel free to contact accessibility@gartner.com.

Google's "Blogger" Accessibility

2006-10-11T18:47:00.000-05:00

While blog owners have all the best intentions, we don't always get around to ensuring our blogs meet usability and accessibility standards. This is just one of those truisms that blog platform vendors, like Blogger, should accept and workaround to help us from ourselves.

Here are two quick, incremental feature updates Blogger could implement to help improve the accessibility of the blogs it supports:

Update the "Add Image" feature and enable bloggers to provide alt or longdesc tags from within the same window without modifying the template code directly. This incremental feature, if added, would make it easier for screen readers to provide visually impaired individuals with richer, contextual meaning and improve the user experience.
Parse the height and width attributes from the image added and to ensure consistent performance across browsers and their assistive technology or user agent plugins.

Windows Vista UX Guidelines

2006-10-10T10:33:00.000-05:00

The team from Redmond have published User Experience Guidelines for application developers looking to leverage new windowing and widget elements found in Vista.

The goals for these UX Guidelines seem to be:

Establish a high quality and consistency baseline for all Windows Vista-based applications.
Answer specific user experience questions.
Make the job of designing 'easier'.

Far be it from me to expound the virtues of a given platform, but, following these guidelines will at least make the job of conforming to Section 508 and W3C accessibility mandates and guidelines much easier as your Vista-based application can more effectively leverage the native widgets and windowing elements of the platform.

Check out the Vista UX Guidelines page on MSDN.

Venture Capitalists as ... Crack Dealers?!?

2006-10-06T15:18:00.000-05:00

Entrepreneur, former Apple Fellow, author and speaker Guy Kawasaki was in Canada today speaking at the entrepreneur Week exit event. The speech, centered around his book Art of the Start, was a great and candid view of Guy's experiences. I would strongly recommend anyone starting a business, business unit, or even radical project initiative, catch Guy speak whenever you can.

Probably the most humorous take-away from the speech was Guy's answer to question posed by an attendee regarding whether or not startups need venture capital to succeed:

Venture capital money is like crack ... since I'm a venture capitalist ... (that question) is like asking a crack dealer if crack is good. The answer, of course, is that crack is bad.

After getting off the "VCs as Crack Dealers" analogy, Guy got back on track and echoed the sentiments of many venture capitalists. Venture capital funding is one way, not the only way, companies can fund the growth of their business.

Check out Guy's blog at http://blog.guykawasaki.com.

Guy Kawasaki Speaking @ Entrepreneur Week

2006-10-04T21:54:00.000-05:00

Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures and author of great books like Art of the Start, will be speaking at the Entrepreneur Week Exit Event in Waterloo on October 6, 2006.

While B-schools and business authors preach the use of a handful of paradigms to start and build your business, Guy simply preaches in a way that speaks to ghetto geeks like me.

If you are looking to start or build a new product, department, business unit or company, then do yourself a favor and pickup Art of the Start. Better yet, catch Guy live and pick up his book. It's money well spent.

Mobile Digital Content Conference

2006-10-03T21:02:00.000-05:00

In the mobile consumer device ecosystem, content is king. It's required to drive loyalty, reduce churn, increase average revenue per user (ARPU) figures, and help recoup infrastructure costs of deploying 3G. Wow. Proliferation of mobile content is an important piece of the puzzle.

Mobile operators and content providers will be landing at the Mobile Digital Content Operations conference next week in Los Angeles to find ways to move mobile content beyond ringtones and into more robust digital content that increase data usage.

We should all hope this conference goes well:-).

Emotion and Usability

2006-10-03T10:40:00.000-05:00

Check out the Via Interaction blog posting where Director of Interactive Development, Tim Beidel, talks about the connection between Emotion and Usability citing a Washtington Post article.

This definitely sounds like an area where research and the creation of methodologies are required.

iTunes + Microsoft Expression Go Reflective

2006-10-02T11:42:00.000-05:00

In a really strange turn of events, both the latest version of iTunes and Microsoft's upcoming Expression studio tools herald new levels of usability. While Steve Jobs trumpeted the arrival and improved ease of use of iTunes 7 at the recent Apple Special Event, Microsoft says the new suite of tools will "enable faster and richer interface development".

While both claims remain to be seen, the one similarity between these two products is they both seem to equate "real-time reflections" as representative of an improved user experience. I wonder if both camps read the same secondary market research stating 'people' really, really liked reflections?!?

Let's look at this from the perspective of a Product Manager responsible for either of these applications. You need to qualify customer demand, seem features that elicit benefit to meet that demand, prioritize those features (and development resources) such that you can deliver against a subset of the most useful and profitable features, and try to allocate at least a modicum of focus on product quality and usability. If this the mind of the Product Manager, why would you ever allocate resources to develop a feature that, at best, "looks cool"?

Think of the overall trade-offs you need to acknowledge to include reflections in your system design. Think of the pre-processor overhead required, the process allocation to render the reflected image in realtime, and the unseen tax this added branch (which will undoubtedly be problematic) will mean from a system quality perspective.

While I'm sure the feature is cool, I'm more certain there were better uses of developer time:

Microsoft - you could have instead developed a built-in trace feature that track and display user inputs. That would enable application developers to see exactly how the system is being used and how to improve both performance and usability.
Apple - you could have instead honed the new iconography such that the images used were a better representative of users' mental model.

... and that's just of the top of my head ... and I'm more of a Product Marketer than a Product Manager.

Disclosure: I use both iTunes 7 and the beta edition of Expression.

Google Hiring UX Practitioners

2006-10-02T07:40:00.000-05:00

Google, the venerable online juggernaut, is hiring a host of usability-related positions in their User Interface and Accessibility Departments. While I can't personally attest to the quality of the opportunities, Google's ongoing interest in adding usability talent to their stable of uber-geeks bodes well for the whole usability ecosystem.

Here are some of the jobs:

Good luck

dotmobi Screws The Little Guy!

2006-09-26T16:33:00.000-05:00

The dotmobi camp today released General Registration of dotmobi domains amidst a flurry of excitement spurred on by the Landrush Press Event. Exciting times. The promise of increased adoption of mobile terminals as wireless internet browsers, a plethora of mobile internet content options designed specifically for handheld devices, and a couple million net new eyeballs waiting to take a gander at site owners content. Sounds like a positive business proposition ... until you look deeper.

Look under the covers and you will see the desire to build mindshare for a new domain suffix, inequitable domain registration prices, and a flawed underlying premise.

YOU DON'T NEED A .MOBI SUFFIX TO MEET THE NEEDS OF MOBILE USERS!!!

Instead, you need to design for multiples. Design for both desktop and mobile users by employing a CSS-based site with a style sheet defined for mobile handsets, or a hack where you identify browser type by its header and point visitors to a /mobile page that has all your content in simply HTML.

All the dotmobi initiative does in the end is provide a false sense of meeting mobile users needs force domain owners, many of whom which can't afford additional costs without associated revenue potential, to register for a more expensive domain to protect their assets.

Well, there is good that will come of this 'shylock' initiative. At least people are talking about focusing on the web experience of mobile users, and at least squatters are provided with a brand new set of domains to hold hostage.

Brand & Usability

2006-09-24T02:51:00.000-05:00

The majority of usability, marketing and brand professionals are well aware of the power that user experience has on a brand. The physical and virtual elements with which your customers use to interact with your brand, and the quality of that interaction, can affect a brand positively or negatively. From Skype's desktop interface to Starbuck drink names, these instances of interaction can impact a brands ability to affect buying behavior ... otherwise known as brand equity. This "experience:brand equity" relationship is known within UX and Marketing disciplines to varying degrees.

What if we were to look at this relationship in reverse? Does the power of a brand affect product usability? If brand equity is the ability to influence user/buyer behavior, and if usability is a measure of the degree to which users can achieve a specific task or objective, then it stands to reason that a brand can indeed affect usability.

Here are a few anecdotal tests of this theory:

Apple Products - Some of the brand associations created and furthered by our friends at Apple definitely affect product usability. Associations of "easy-to-use", "integrated solution", "cool", "creative", "counter-culture" and "different" will definitely shape how a user subjectively perceives and rates the usefulness and effectiveness of Apple products. By creating and fostering these associations, Apple has in fact created a dynamic whereby users are almost peer pressured into thinking Apple products are in fact highly usable. If a user didn't see these products as usable, then they may not be able to identify themselves with the Apple brand identity. Instead, they wouldn't cool, sexy or different. If they were, then they would adopt the mob mentality and 'get it'. (Note - I use both Mac and PC products)

GAP Jeans - How many times have you seen a friend/colleague/family member proudly wearing $50 jeans from the GAP that do not fit? Why would someone do that? Well, they very well might have seen the GAP ads positioning the GAP brand as sexy, young, hip and too-cool-to-care. They might have also heard a sales associate mention there is a GAP jean for every body type. The message being sent, and the reason your friend seems to be perpetually sucking in their belly to reduce the pain caused by their jeans, is the apparent power of the GAP brand (read: brand equity), its messaging and positioning have combined to make a very powerful set of lenses through which consumers view GAP products. If there is a jean for every body type, and if GAP is sexy/young/hip/too-cool-to-care, then consumers MUST be able to find a jean that fits if they want to be 'somebody' and self-identify with GAP brand associations. (Note - I do not own GAP jeans as they really aren't made for people with booty and legs bigger than those of really long distance runner.)

OK. Granted, these are just 2 examples that suffer from a lack of supporting qualitative or quantitative research. The logic is solid though. A product/company brand can indeed affect product usability, even if only its initial or perceived usability.

I wonder if this explains why I REALLY like Nonfat Grande Tazo Chai lattes ...

Moto Q #2 - Perceived vs. Realized Usability

2006-09-20T12:48:00.000-05:00

As per my previous post, I am keeping a pseudo diary of my pre and post usage experiences with the Moto Q to investigate my initial perceived view of the device in relation to its realized usability. My hope is that we can gain an understanding, regardless of how anecdotal it may be, of the value of our initial impressions of product usability and capability against the ability to actually use the product to complete the tasks for which I bought the device.

OK. So my initial impressions have been very positive. The device is sleek, sexy, feels substantial to the touch while still being light ... which is a hard balance to achieve.

Task #1 - Turn the device on and setup my basic preferences (language, location, time, etc.).

The image you see below is my initial attempts to turn on the device. After looking for an "on" button or one that approximates a button with an image I would associate with "on", the device become permanently locked on the screen below that says "Booting the OS ... enable sticky lock success". I've done a hard reset on the device 4 times and still get the same "black screen of death".

So far, my initial positive experiences have taken a drastic turn for the worst as I now have to call Motorola Support or worse ... read a bloody manual!!

Stay tuned for more as I try to work through the issues so I can actually complete Task #1.

Perceived vs. Realized Usability

2006-09-15T15:19:00.000-05:00

In this post, we use a real-world example to test the theory that perceived product capabilities and usability differ before and after product purchase. In our example, we look at the new Motorola Q smartphone from Verizon. It's a sexy new smartphone that Motorola hopes will engage business/prosumer just like the Razr product engaged mass consumers.

Here are some pics of the device fresh out of the box, before I even try to turn it on.

Sexy, right?

Sleek and thin ..

So far so good.

Trying to be as objective as I can, I'm excited about this product. It has a QWERTY, it's thin, it handles wireless web + email. My first impressions are that it is sexy. Sure, it runs Windows Mobile 5.0 and isn't going to be 100% error-free ... and it's the first rev of a Motorola device which isn't always a good idea ... but it hits my sweet spot in terms of lots of power for little money.

In my next series of postings, I'll go through a set of tasks based on my normal usage behavior and dedicate a post to each task. My theory is that my perceived usability will differ before and after use.

Stay tuned for more ... it should be interesting.

Workflows Gone Wild

2006-09-15T00:14:00.000-05:00

The emergence of the Internet has enabled many traditional processes to evolve into web-based workflows that promise consumers quick and easy access. With the good intentions of designers and corporations, and acceptance by consumers, there still seems to be so many workflow applications that cause errors and fall short on this initial consumer promise.

Today we look at a scenario where this "workflows gone wild" seems to hold true. Let's take a look at a real, and recent, scenario where I was trying to price a new Toyota RAV4 (pretty nice redesign BTW). All I wanted to do is check out the newly redesigned '07 RAV SUV and see how much it would cost for the least expensive configuration that had body-colored door handles. It would be even better if I could stay with a manual transmission, get some power options and some cold A/C for the warm Canadian climate (read: really cold).

As you can see in the screenshot above, I didn't get past Step 1 in this process before running into an issue.

As you can see in the screenshot below, there are a few things that just don't work:

While I think I'm on Step 1, the Step 2 label is highlighted?!? I've got no idea why this is, except to draw my attention away from making my first selection. Result - decreased trust, increased frustration.

After making my selection and being near the bottom of the page, we would expect to find a button or hyperlinked text marked "Next". No such luck. Result - decreased confidence.

Only after looking around clueless for a minute or two, and after feeling as though I'm the biggest idiot on the planet, did I realize I had to go back to the top nav to select the next step of the process. Result - task failure, exit site before gathering info and/or purchasing.

So what went wrong? I came to price the car, and instead I've left the site in utter disgust. I left this site because the expected effort and frustration I would need to endure to continue in this process outweighs the perceived benefit yield of receiving this info. Put simply, continuing through this process past Step 1 seemed liked too much of a hassle for me to endure today.

Folks a Toyota, listen up:

The new RAV4 looks really nice and now seems less likely to break under the strain of my snowboard + gear + cooler + 12-year old son + his gear.
Please, please, please invest some time in formative tests to understand the mental model of your target audience and how we expect to maneuver through your process.
If you can't get management to approve some simple usability tests, then please, please, please just take a look at the top 10 online auto sites to see how they design this "build" process and learn from their successes.

Too bad though. It really does look like a nice SUV.

Introducing Urban Usability

2006-09-10T23:33:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the new blog that looks at the devices, software and ordinary things people use everyday from the perspective of usability. Part rant, part study, I'm sure each post will be an interesting read in the least.