Whoops! I forgot to mention

It completely slipped my mind, but I was going to write this awhile back:

I finally rejoined the start-up world and joined PrepChamps last friday!  I’m starting on Monday and I can’t wait to see how it goes =]

I LEGO N.Y. – Abstract City Blog – NYTimes.com

I LEGO N.Y. – Abstract City Blog – NYTimes.com.

I can’t help it.  I love Legos, and this is…simply…amazing.

recently fell into the market (rather abruptly) so I’m looking for Interaction Designer contract work…

Bryan Minihan
bjminihan@gmail.com

My First Robot

Not much to look at, and it just sits there, twitches a little, and eventually goes in circles.

I’m working very hard on the next one – same thing, just the size of a V6 engine to go in my car.  Hoo doggy!

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Yay!

 

Next & Previous Button Locations

Regarding a recent discussion on IXDA.org, I couldn’t help but visually lay out two different aspects of the discussion (a picture’s worth 1000 words, right?). Which do you think flows better, assuming the tab order flows from the last checkbox to the Next button, regardless of its location, and Enter submits the form (clicks Next):

That weird “empty feeling” from bulk-content creators

I’m sure you’ve seen them. More and more these days when you search for information – real information, the answer to a problem, for instance – on the web, you come across scores of sites chock-a-block full of content, but with no real inherent value.

They’re usually tagged with innocuous, ambivalent sounding names like http://www.snappy-answers42.com, have somewhat decent navigation, and no end of links to what seem like good answers to your question.

The problem, however, is that the only thing they have in common with the question you’re answering is the keywords in your search query.

As an example, I find most of my technical answers on Deja News *, but when I find weird processes running in my Windows task manager, I frequently just type the application’s name in Google to find out what it does and whether I should remove it.

That worked pretty well, up until about a year ago. Suddenly, out of the blue, the first page or so of links that came up mentioned the application’s name a dozen or more times in the page, but never actually said what the application DOES, or whether it’s harmful.

Like I said, reams of information containing my question, but very few pages with the answer.

I wish I had bookmarked one of the more informative sites I used to find. The neat thing about the Internet is that I didn’t really need to know where I found the answer, before. I just needed to look for it, and it would be there.

It seems that savvy SEO consultants and Content Management gurus have made it more difficult to find real information anymore. They discovered some time ago that if you hire 10 people to write 1000 articles with your site’s most popular keywords, link to your site through them, then get people to visit them, they’ll increase your site’s search engine ranking. Probably not their fault since they are just adapting to indexing algorithms used by the biggest search engines, who are in turn adapting to the hacks and tweaks web developers used to make to cheat their way into number one search engine listings.

Dunno where it’s gonna go from here…Wikipedia, Deja, CNET, Del.icio.us and a few other sites are still great for the niches they serve. As for finding anything relevant through pure searches, I’m left with this weird “empty feeling” in my head…

* Google Groups, but I still remember Deja, so I still call it that, and the URL still works =]

Setting the bar for Usability…

I try to work on maximizing my impact within my own sphere of influence. How big that sphere is, and how much I can do within it, is just about up to me (most of the time). Therefore, in UCD projects, where my team is asked to contribute usability methods to measure user requirements and risks to the user experience, I try to position us at the point of greatest possible impact on the outcome. So far, our strategy has been to try and be there right at the point of idea conception – before money has been spent, before a real solution has been chosen, often before the rest of the team members have been assigned. It’s there, I think, that we can have the most effect on the eventual usability of a system or solution.

However, over the years, we have consistently been trumped by the holiest of all project metrics: cost. Time and again, even when we can clearly identify the most usable solution at the outset, clients go with the cheapest option, regardless of any usability impact. I definitely don’t think that’s wrong – businesses have to make money. There is no valid argument against that fact. The problem, I believe, is that usability, and the metrics which define it, have not yet matured to the point where an accurate cost value can be associated with any set of solutions.

True, we can measure productivity, both in time saved by users of a system, steps removed from a manual or inefficient process, or resources saved. But those numbers don’t cleanly tie to a legitimate opportunity cost of going with an un/usable system.

The whole point of the above is that we should set a bar for usability. A goal that, when achieved, will place usability at the same level as cost, in deciding the solution to a problem.

Within Artificial Intelligence circles, the Turing Test is the bar that, when surpassed, will have proven that a machine is conscious or at least indistinguishable from a human being. Why can’t we set one for usability, in making business decisions?

How about: “The needs of people who use technology systems will have equal weight in business decisions that affect technology, when their needs are sufficiently quantified to evaluate against and offset pure cost factors.” Or maybe more simply, “When all technical solution costs consider the increased expense from poor usability, then users will have equal weight in technology decisions.”

It’s kind of a half-formulated idea, but I hate to see people make decisions without knowing all the information. I don’t think people get the information they need because usability hasn’t yet made it blisteringly easy to understand it.

How we might work in the future…

Adding to the Information Workplace topic from earlier, I was curious about what the IW might eventually look like, so I created a demo to illustrate how social networking, presence awareness, role-based content and simplified intelligent controls would look somewhere down the road.

Here’s a link to my write-up and a link to the functioning prototype at the bottom. If you happen to get a look, let me know what you think…

http://www.bryanminihan.com/case-informationworkplace.html

Regarding Consistency…

In response to a well-thought-out post by Russell Wilson on the IxD discussion board, I responded with my take on enforcing consistency in homogenous user experiences (e.g. our company’s intranet portal users – primarily employees from different business units with similar expectations of the service)…enjoy =]

I agree with your overall tenet that consistency is not the be-all and end-all arbiter of design decisions. Creativity is equally important to the experience and occasionally unique circumstances require varying from the norm (consistency) and/or completely reinventing the wheel.

On the other hand, the Wheel example in your post illustrates the boundary between consistency and creativity quite well. You’re right, neither bicycles, motorcycles, vans nor sport cars should have the same wheel design – but they’re all round, have a hole in the middle, are sized according to their load and treaded according to their anticipated use.

In our last portal redesign, we determined that consistency was the number one problem with our interface, in two veins:

1. The overall experience was TOO uniform and looked the same everywhere you went, and
2. Behavior elements like buttons, links, menus and body content were completely different on just about every page, and frequently several times within the same page.

In our redesign, we implemented a principle called “Interface consistency with content creativity”. We normalized all links, menus, buttons and typefaces to one font style and behavior (blue underlined links, etc). At the same time, we added 20-odd slightly different “themes” tied to business units, to give people more visual cues to understand where they were in the 500+ community portal. We relaxed some standards around images and clip-art (ugh), let users be a little more creative in their communications, and the resulting portal is much more “friendly, social and usable” than before (taken from recent surveys).

The statement above, “Interface Consistency, Content Creativity” really helped us clear the cobwebs of what we (as the UCD team) meant by consistency. When communicators & business folks understood we weren’t trying to change the way they communicate, they bought into the concept much more quickly. In fact, I’d say part of our job was to empower communicators by reducing variance in general site behavior, in favor of highlighting the true content that every portal visitor needed to know.

The lesson learned from our previous portal? Creativity is a necessary part of designing an interactive, friendly experience. Inconsistency for *purely arbitrary reasons* (i.e. because the designer wanted to be different) achieves the opposite of the site’s intended effect – it shifts people’s focus from the content or task to questions like “Why the hell is that button shaped like a wagon?”

I don’t know if I’m agreeing with Russel’s post or not, but definitely appreciate the discussion. It’s important and worthwhile having with any development group who questions the relevance of Section 508, W3C, or corporate web standards.

Our air freshener needs help…

There’s a little wall-mounted electronic air freshener in our men’s room on the floor where I work. It’s one of those advanced things that automatically spits out a certain amount of freshener every so often. Thankfully, and probably optimally, they have mounted it above a little doorway just inside the men’s room entrance, before you reach the sinks.

I say it needs help because it’s been complaining for the past two weeks.

Every ten seconds or so, it beeps twice. Kind of quiet, in a very polite way. It sort of makes this little “meep…meep” sound. It’s a little bit like a timer letting you know it’s still there.

I can only assume from the fact that it’s been doing this awhile, and by the two zeros on its little display window, that it’s out of air freshener. We have a pretty clean group at my work, so you can’t really notice the difference too much.

Except for the “meep…meep”. Every ten seconds.

It got me thinking…what a clever idea to make the air freshener meep like that when it runs out of air freshener. It makes sense that it would keep doing it until it’s refilled, because our attendants visit twice a day to freshen up in there.

On the other hand, our attendants visit twice a day, have done so for two straight weeks, and yet……”meep…meep”. They don’t hear it. Or maybe they hear it but the cartridges for the thing are too expensive.

Whichever is the case, I think it’s hooked up to the central electric supply. It would be sadder if not, because in addition to the “meep…meep” we would all hear it slowly peter out over time, which would make it sound like a very patient little forgotten robot, stuck in the men’s room, complaining about the smell, or lack of “air-freshened” smell, with no hope of rescue before its little batteries ran out.

I wrote this little piece because, while it must have seemed like a clever idea at the time, giving the air freshener a “meep” doesn’t seem to have increased its chance of being filled one iota. The result is kind of annoying (feels like you have to hurry up in there), and if you think anthropomorphically, a little sad.

I guess a better solution would have been to provide a transmitter for the beep, to let whoever manages the attendants know to order more spray stuff. Another option would be to make it beep whenever someone with an attendant’s badge comes in – but louder, more insistently, and perhaps let it spray something different for them. Something that says “I’m not helping the situation in here, and can you help me?”.

Even better, it would be great if someone left a pack of air freshener cartridges in the men’s room, so I could just replace it myself.