VIA Interaction

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Hope for a better phone?

I've got a Treo 650, the kind of thingamajig that people with gadget lust want to take a closer look at when they see me whip it out. It's a phone, it's a PDA, it gets my e-mail, it surfs the Web.

It frustrates me endlessly.

Those same curious folks don't seem to be paying much attention when I struggle to answer it (what tiny button do I push for that?), when it does not respond to taps on the screen, when the person at the other end asks me for the umpteenth time to repeat myself.

I've solved some of the problems with a Bluetooth headset that makes talking on the phone almost bearable, but adds another layer of complexity to the simple act of answering the phone.

Help may be on the way. The New York Times reports today that Apple may be teaming with Motorola to release an iPod cellphone.

Business 2.0 predicted in April that a phone was next for Apple (and even had former Apple designers at Pentagram imagine what it would look like), but said they believed Steve Jobs would need to be in complete control of the product - the way it looks, the way it works.

If that's the case, that bodes well for cellphone users.

Any child can figure out how to use an iPod to listen to music. (I have proof: I once tossed mine into the backseat to my then 6-year-old daughter and told her "spin the wheel and push the buttons." She was listening to music, and not whining, within minutes.)

If Apple can't figure out how to make listening to music and talking on the phone easy, I wonder who can? I'm eager to see if the device will be a PDA and if it will enable Web browsing.

The biggest challenge of convergence is not the technology - it is the ability to make something that people can use.

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/30/2005 10:11:00 AM

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Monday, August 29, 2005

Open a new window?

We usually counsel against opening new browser windows when a visitor clicks on a hyperlink.

The motivation for opening the new window is usually to keep people on your site. However, it ends up being an annoyance and effectively disables one of the most used navigation devices on the Web - the browser's Back button. (That's because the new window has no history to go back to.)

However, we have noticed something over the years in our own usability testing: People are much more facile when it comes to manipulating windows. We can undoubtedly credit their years of knocking down pop-up advertisements for that.

Now, Jakob Nielsen (of all people!) is arguing that there is a case for opening new windows when the target page requires loading an application like Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word.

People tend to treat those pages like they are within applications (and the way the browsers' embed the application controls for them certainly suggests that they are), and close the browser when they are done with them.

Writes Nielsen,

"In user testing, we often observe the following behavior: When people are finished using PDF files, Word memos, PowerPoint slides, Excel spreadsheets, and similar documents, they click the window's close box instead of the Back button. This gets them out of the document all right, but not back to the Web page from whence they started.

"Blowing away browser windows is particularly bad on intranets, where users often have to log in or jump through other hoops to access document repositories."

That sounds right to me, and something we will look for in our testing.

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/29/2005 12:17:00 PM

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Friday, August 26, 2005

What's your PAQ?

The people we've worked with over the past two or three years know that we are increasingly concerned with the way our Web designs look, not just the way they function.

I wrote a white paper about it a few years ago -- Beyond usability: User experience.

In the years since, though, it has not gotten any easier to figure out definitively whether we have been succeeding, although designs like ones we released earlier this year for OhioHealth seem to be a success.

However, there is more data accumulating to support the notion that the emotional effect of your design is an important contributor to whether people will like your site.

In a paper published in this month's Communications of the ACM, "The Importance of Affective Quality," Ping Zhang and Na Li of Syracuse University demonstrate that a Web site's perceived affective quality (PAQ) "has a significant positive impact on both PU [perceived usefulness] and PEOU [perceived ease of use]."

Perceived affective quality did not have a direct impact on an important other measure -- behavior intention to use the site. However, as Zhang and Li point out, it is well established in CHI studies that perceived ease of use has a significant impact on perceived usefulness, and perceived usefulness has a significant positive impact on behavior intention.

Follow that?

Put it this way (as Zhang and Li, borrowing from Donald Norman, say):

"Pleasing things work better."

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/26/2005 05:44:00 PM

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Monday, August 22, 2005

New York Times: For the Niche Film Audience, Studios Are Appealing by Blog

An article about blogs as places for advertisers to reach "a very small subset of influential thinkers and opinion leaders":

For the Niche Film Audience, Studios Are Appealing by Blog - New York Times

Comscore recently released a report (PDF) about the composition of the blog audience.

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/22/2005 10:38:00 AM

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Google releases new tools

Google has updated its priceless Desktop Search. As part of the update, it has released Sidebar, which enables you to quickly access a number of tools - RSS feeds, news, weather, photos, "scratch pad" notes, etc. - from a panel on your desktop.

You can download the new Desktop Search beta here.

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/22/2005 09:30:00 AM

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Monday, August 15, 2005

SiteProNews: The 10 Best Resources for CSS

We're increasing employing CSS techniques to design Web pages. Here's a good site for information about it: SiteProNews: The 10 Best Resources for CSS

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/15/2005 11:21:00 AM

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Top tools of all time

Lots of stuff crossing the transom today. Forbes, with help from one of my favorite usability gurus, Don Norman, is running down the top 20 tools of all time - The 20 Most Important Tools

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/15/2005 11:19:00 AM

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Anti-spyware may be limiting marketing effectiveness

Anti-spyware programs are making it harder for marketers to track campaign effectiveness because so many people are preventing third-party cookies.

Cookies are small text files that are sent to your computer by Web sites that you are visiting. They can only be read by the Web site that sent them.

However, on commercial sites there are likely to be images in a Web page that are coming from domains other than the one you think you are visiting.

Those images, usually banner advertisements and tracking images from Web analytics companies, enable those "third parties" to send you a cookie, too.

(A first-party cookie is one that comes from the domain you are visiting - the one in the URL that you can see in your browser's address box. A third-party cookie comes from someone else whose images are embedded in the Web page you are looking at.)

More on this in "Spyware Heats Up the Debate Over Cookies" in today's New York Times:

"Antispyware programs often leave in place first-party cookies, which can save users the inconvenience of having to log in to a news site each time they visit, but remove third-party cookies, the main target of users' ire. Some people say they think that total anonymity is the way to go.

The threat to the bottom line is real. Mr. Peterson said cookies not only helped sites measure overall profitability, but were critical in measuring the effectiveness of individual advertising campaigns. Marketers, for instance, could conceivably pay a Web site to deliver ads to 100,000 people, but only reach about 60,000 because so many of them were being counted twice.

'If you're O.K. with getting your ads to half as many people, and not really being sure how effective your campaign was, well then you can happily put your head in the sand,' Mr. Peterson said. 'Most people tell us they want data more accurate than that.'"

WebTrends, the Web statistics application, reports that sites find they have 10-15% more unique visitors when Web sites switch from third-party cookies to first-party cookies to track visits (that is, they switch to WebTrends from hosted competitors like WebSideStory's HitBox).

This, along with HTML e-mail image-blocking, is a real trend to watch in Internet marketing.

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/15/2005 09:55:00 AM

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Podcasts

News item:

Podcasts: All the Rage or About to Fizzle? - New York Times

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/15/2005 09:37:00 AM

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How big is the Web?

News item:

In Silicon Valley, a Debate Over the Size of the Web - New York Times:

"SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 14 - How big is the World Wide Web? Many Internet engineers consider that query one of those imponderable philosophical questions, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

But the question about the size of the Web came under intense debate last week after Yahoo announced at an Internet search engine conference in Santa Clara, Calif., that its search engine index - an accounting of the number of documents that can be located from its databases - had reached 19.2 billion.

Because the number was more than twice as large as the number of documents (8.1 billion) currently reported by Google, Yahoo's fierce competitor and Silicon Valley neighbor, the announcement - actually a brief mention in a Yahoo company Web log - set off a spat. Google questioned the way its rival was counting its numbers."

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/15/2005 09:36:00 AM

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Saturday, August 13, 2005

Life and Death Usability

Whne we try to determine if a Web site works by observing people trying to use it, we frequently find that our point of view shifts from "All the instructions are there, it's their fault" to "We need to change this to support the way people interact with it."

In other words, you adapt to the customer, not force the customer to adapt to you.

I travel this stretch of Route 1 quite a bit and it is dangerous. The state of Maine has brought in a human factors expert to work on the "interface" in an attempt to find ways to cut down accidents.

Psychologist helps analyze dangerous Route 1 stretch:

WOOLWICH — Officials are using a different kind of expert to help them shrink the number of accidents on Route 1 between Woolwich and Wiscasset. A psychologist has been collaborating with engineers, police and town officials on a plan to improve safety on the stretch of road.

Results of the Route 1 safety audit won't be available for two weeks. But members of the team said psychologist Tom Granda of the Federal Highway Administration has already recommended several inexpensive measures to make the road safer, such as reducing signage to eliminate driver confusion and repainting pavement to make turning lanes clearer.

Granda has a doctorate in human factors psychology and works at the administration's research center in McLean, Va. He and his colleagues assess driver behaviors using test cars and simulated driving conditions.

'My job is to integrate human beings into a system, like a highway system,' Granda said. 'We try to make sure the system fits the person. If you design a system correctly, then you will lessen the number of errors humans make.' ...

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/13/2005 12:24:00 PM

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Friday, August 12, 2005

Type size

It's a pet peeve of mine, particularly because I need bifocals (but don't yet have them), a result of presbyopia, the inevitable deterioration of eyes' ability to focus that makes it hard to see objects close up.

Like computer screens.

The Web is not for kids any more - everyone uses the Web. And Web designers (youngsters, for the most part) love tiny type. Drives me crazy.

As a result of the aging baby boomers, industries where there is a closer correlation between readability and money are making changes. From "Books, Not Tales, Get Taller Before Baby Boomers' Eyes" in today's New York Times:

Faced with declining sales, two of the biggest publishers of mass-market titles, the Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster, have begun issuing new paperbacks by some of their most popular authors in a bigger size that allows larger type and more space between lines.

'We've been losing the foundation of our customer base because their eyesight is getting worse, and the books are getting harder and harder to read,' said Jack Romanos, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, whose Pocket Books division introduced the mass-market paperback format in the United States in 1939.

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/12/2005 09:27:00 AM

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Thursday, August 11, 2005

Study: Most Web sites designed for men

British researchers have discovered that men and women have different preferences for Web design.

Turns out women like sites with more color in the background and in the type, and with informal rather than posed pictures.

Men respond better to dark colors and straight, horizontal lines, three-dimensional looks and images of "self-propelling" objects rather than stationary ones.

The Associated Press reports that the researchers at Glamorgan University Business School in Wales took it one step further: "With those standards in mind, the researchers checked out the Web sites for 32 British universities and determined that 94 percent had a 'masculine orientation.' Two percent showed a female-favored arrangement."

Viva la difference, part 2:

A New York Times piece about the difference between male and female brains. Possibly more controversial!

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/11/2005 10:34:00 AM

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Monday, August 01, 2005

Emotion and Design

One of my favorite topics of the last few years, from "Gadgets Include User Attachment" in the Los Angeles Times (emphasis mine):

"But neurologist Antonio Damasio believes that tapping into emotions is more than just a nice touch. In many cases, he said, emotions help drive decisions. In his studies of patients whose brain injuries impaired their ability to express emotions, Damasio found that many had difficulty making decisions, even though they were able to clearly articulate the pros and cons of various options.

'Some people think it's best to reason with a cool head,' said Damasio, professor of neurology at the University of Iowa. 'Others think they should always follow their feelings. The truth is that emotion is part of the mechanism of reasoning. The lack of it is very detrimental to decision making.'

In other words, emotional design can provide that unknowable something that beckons a person to buy."

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/01/2005 01:58:00 PM

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Open Source Maze

Today's New York Times reports that it may be easier to evaluate open source software as a result of an initiative from Carnegie Mellon, Intel and SpikeSource, a company that evaluates free software.

The ratings will be available at a new site, Business Readiness Rating.

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/01/2005 09:51:00 AM

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