Northern User Experience

I encountered this pop-up notice on a Flash-based T-Shirt editor application last night.

It reads

Loading Error
A loading error occured [sic]. This might negatively influence the use of the application. Please reload the application if this occurs.

Beside the spelling mistake, the euphemism for ‘the application might break’, it’s also not clear after which ‘this’ occurring one should reload the application. And will I lose my work so far?

Judith asked me to put her presentation from Yesterday’s meeting up on the blog. So, here it is: Personas Presentation (280K).

I had to convert it to PDF to get it uploaded into WordPress. If anyone would prefer it in the original PowerPoint format, just let me know.

I’ve been made aware of a Firefox extension for diagraming/GUI prototyping called Pencil. I’m going to take a look at it, to see how it compares to old stagers like Visio, and newer whizz-bang options like Axure, but I was wondering if anyone else has any experience or opinions on this tool?

http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/

Thanks to everyone who came along to Sage yesterday, and nice to meet some new people too. Apologies for the misleading 8pm start time posted in a couple of places….

I really enjoyed the discussion on measuring user behaviours and metrics for usability: it was great to have some input from people (particuarly Steve & Mike) who’ve done some of this with web analytics, and get some extremely valid context and caution from Judith. The stuff about measuring usability improvements (KPIs, A-B testing, and cash!) was good too, as was the discussion on surveys.

Our next meeting is due to be on 3 September. I won’t be able to be there, unfortunately, but Judith offered to kick off a discussion on personas, and Manchester Digital Development Agency was suggested as a possible venue that definitely sounded worth investigating.

We talked a little in Wednesday’s (July 2nd) meeting about the lack of recognised qualifications to audit or certify a web site as “accessible”. I recalled a customer of my company had asked about the use of a “trusted friend”. Alas, my recollection was faulty and the phrase they had used was “critical friend”.

It is desirable that the system meets the W3C level 2 accessibility standards or conforms to another equivalent standard…
Please supply detail of how you audit your systems compliance to achieve accessibility standards. Do you make use of a ‘critical friend’ in this process if so, please state…

– extract from a request for tender document

I researched at the time the meaning of this phrase, which was new to me, and found the following reference in Wikipedia:

A critical friend can be defined as a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critiques of a person’s work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work.

– Wikipedia article ‘Critical Friend’

The concept is very interesting and seems to have been coined in the context of UK local government.

To paraphrase, I might describe a critical friend as someone who is knowledgeable and honest enough to tell you the truth about the bad stuff, but who will, equally, give praise about the good stuff. A ‘consultant’ who is likely to dress up your short comings in fancy praise-sounding words in a fat document for a fat fee will not do.

It needs to be someone who is knowledgeable about the system under review or at least the domain involved. Someone who perhaps has a moral interest in seeing that the system succeeds: both for your organisation as supplier and the end user as consumer, but who can still be paid a reasonable fee for their time.

In the case of an accessibility review it needs to be someone who can look at the whole picture; beyond just the validity of the mark-up and ticking the boxes from the WCAG check-lists. Someone who can empathise with at least some of the challenges faced by people with a range of disabilities. Someone who can understand the use cases and evaluate your system from a functional, goal oriented viewpoint.

It naturally follows that this someone must understand ‘usability’ and the very close relationship between the two disciplines — An accessible site is likely to be more usable and a more usable site goes a long way to address some of the cognitive accessibility issues.

I saw this on Boxes and Arrows

“- Journey to the Center of Design – Jared Spool
There’s a growing sentiment that spending limited resources on user research takes away from essential design activities. Is it time for user- centered design to evolve into something else? Or is there something else happening in our world of experience design that makes UCD obsolete? Jared Spool gives and entertaining and enlightening key note address at the 2008 IA Summit.(published 05/01/08)(published 04/25/08)”

I think it raises an interesting discussion point, on the business value of User Centred Design.

For a starter, I’ve sold UCD as a way to reduce time-to-market. The theory being - ask the user what they want, then do it, then test it again. The business don’t have to decide “what they think” the user wants, which is when I found a lot of time wasted.

How do other people approach this?

This is the link: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-2008-day-1

As some of you already know, I’m a big fan of the idea of minority report style interfaces, and the Nintendo Wii. This guy has done some work with wiimotes to create cheap interfaces such as this Desktop VR display.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

I’d like to start a thread on here about how we could approach the usability issues of VR displays like this, and really about how as we move forward what sort of challenges people see coming, and how they might be solved.

For a start, the reason I’m so keen on this idea, is that having had back pain due to sitting in a chair for prolonged periods, I can see a need for an “Active Interface” where I can spend my day moving about to interact with my computer.

I think that one of the interesting problems that the VR displays will pose, apart from the ability to link a point on the screen/in the space in front of you, with your finger/wiimote is that Information Architecture will become even more massively important. However, I think that by Benchmarking some real world solutions - like supermarkets, some of those problems will already have been solved.

Andre Charland over at IXDA posted an article (Is Eye Tracking Out of Reach?) on O’Reilly’s Inside RIA site. It seems to have sparked quite a discussion. Go check it out.

Hat tip: Thanks to Lucy Buykx for the tip.

These are the slides from a presentation given by Judith Garman on Wednesday 2nd April 2008.

introduction-to-eye-tracking