Archive for Usability
I recently read Nudge, a book that covered some really interesting cases of how people can be affected simply by the way a choice is presented to them.
In the case of software, this is a tremendous issue. How many people use the default theme in Chrome or Firefox? How many people have the grass background in Windows?
Those are certainly mundane examples that matter very little to a user, but there are certainly other cases where the default does change their experience. Take signing up for a newsletter, for example. Or getting notified when there are additional comments on a blog post. Those choices will greatly affect a user’s experience with that piece of software.
Much of Nudge discusses giving people the option to control their environment and what they want should they want to make an explicit choice. Otherwise, give them a default that will most likely work best for them and educate them about the possibilities out there and what’s available.
For software, do you make your default something that will make your company money right now? Or money in the long term? Or promote customer retention and recommendations?
Ultimately, those are business decisions. Though, personally, I think it’s always clear that those last goals go hand-in-hand.
March 30, 2011
Yesterday, I read an article on Think Vitamin about Chinese web design written by @sketchytree. I went on to read the comments after and realized that many people seemed to have missed the point.
Sure, the title of the article notwithstanding, the author, Nick Johnson, compares and contrasts and draws attention to some major Chinese designs that are what a Westerner would call bad. Note that last part. It would be a Westerner’s opinion and not absolute truth.
It got me thinking about localization in general. For example, I work on Leading Hotels of the World on a day-to-day basis. That website comes in a variety of languages: English, German, Japanese and more recently, Spanish and Italian.
Notice that the biggest difference among the localizations of the site are the translations. Much of the functionality stays the same. None of the languages are left-to-right, so we don’t have to account for that, either. The design essentially stays the same.
This doesn’t have to be the case. For example, many cultures interpret colors very differently from one another. What if you’re trying to design a website around love. Something that evokes many powerful emotions from many people. More than likely, your company will be target only a certain culture, but if you check that chart, Western, Eastern European and Japanese cultures associate red with love, while Native Americans associate yellow, Hindus green, and Africans blue.
After taking something that is so ubiquitous, you already have some major design issues on your hands in terms of just color. You’re already getting into issues, and we don’t even have a design.
In addition, you have to consider cultural preferences, practices, understood symbols, on and on.
It’s relatively easy to see that every culture is going to have a certain design that works best for it. There is no best design for all cultures, just as there is no best design that will please all users.
To truly achieve localization, an organization will need to consider everything it does in regards to that culture’s users and their wants and needs. To be truly localized, you’ll really need a designer from every culture to design for that culture.
Of course, the world’s not perfect, few companies have to deal with these issues, and fewer still have the resources to devote to so many different approaches, but next time you see an “ugly” design, you can re-consider the audience and culture it was designed for.
January 27, 2011
I’ll preface this with saying that it might just be me thinking this, but Gmail’s Priority Inbox that was recently released is something that just isn’t that cool.
CRN’s article, currently one of the top hits on Google gives these three reasons that it’s a game-changer:
- It sorts Gmail for you.
- Users can also set filters.
- Users have to wade through less junk.
First of all, #2 and #3 were already there.
I use filters all the time for emails I want to keep, but don’t necessarily want to read, to do things like mark them as read, give them a label and archive them. Newegg’s daily deal emails are a good example of this. I want to get them, but I don’t want to see them every day, I just want to peruse them from time to time. Filters have been there as long as I can remember, they’re nothing new for the priority inbox.
As for junk email – that was one of the greatest thing switching to Gmail got users from the start: an amazing spam filter. It’s so well done that when spam gets through, I usually end up opening the email because I never expect anything to get through. How did priority inbox change that?
Finally, and this is might be my biggest issue, is that it makes Gmail more cluttered. Gmail is great for it’s power while being so simple. It’s the same reason I don’t understand multiple inboxes. I would consider myself a heavy email user, but it’s really not that hard to quickly go through and just handle the emails as they come in so they never get to the point where I need something to sort it for me. I don’t need to add clutter in order for Gmail to try and figure out what’s important for me. I can tell within a second if an email is important.
I’m a huge Google fan and I do think it’s a rare occurrence when they get something wrong, but here I think that this is a pretty useless feature. In fact, I wanted to immediately disable it, but because I’m a Google fan, I had to give it a fair shake. But, when every Facebook notification was coming through as important, but a payment from Paypal wasn’t, I had had it.
Sure, I could spend time customizing priorities, but I know at a glance what’s important, and what is important is constantly changing to the point it would take me more time to go through and customize important emails than it would be just to handle them the way I have been. I’m not going to drink the kool-aid on this one, Gmail’s Priority Inbox is just not useful.
September 5, 2010
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