Can you still maintain harmony and be platform free?

I recently completed research for a platform independent application that can be accessed by the iPhone, PC and digital TV. What became apparent very quickly was that the harmony of the user experience across all platforms was not consistently positive as the application lacked continuity when viewed on different platforms e.g. the TV programme search did not perform or behave the same as the PC search, it was not as flexible. In addition, the handset used to control the TV programme selection proved cognitively challenging as the handset did not offer the standard affordances displayed on “standard” interactive TV handsets. To elicit positive emotional and behavioural responses we have to understand the ergonomics of the hardware that the application is accessed by. In addition, the user needs to understand the application and the relationship between each device and expects a positive user experience irrespective of the device through which the application is being accessed. Each platform has various affordances and capabilities, from buttons and icons that are ergonomically hardwired so there are limitations at each stage in the development process. None the less, the user expects the same level of consistency in the integrative quality of the elements. To create a consistent positive experience, the user expects to encounter the same level of consistency and interaction between the:

- Aesthetic style, brand and quality - does the product have an emotive visual tone of voice that appeals to younger or older audience segmentation? Is the design culturally meaningful?
- The story – the user needs to assimilate very quickly, what is the purpose of the service and its benefits? Can I use it?
- The performance and primary usage capabilities – the time taken to interact with the application via each platform and complete the primary tasks.

More research is required to identify and understand how the users would expect to manipulate the application using a TV remote control and mobile devices such as the iphone (which incidentally only supports the Safari browser agent). To provide a positive interaction and increase the brand credibility, the relationship between the TV remote and the TV interface has to offer good affordances to increase the efficiency of primary tasks such as searching and scheduling a programme. To maintain the positive user experience, the application should also offer the same level of continuity, functionality and flexibility in design so that the same level of satisfaction can be achieved across all devices.

From post-its to design patterns

Design patterns are generally referred to as a way to support developers and help them to reuse proven solutions and solve common design problems while composing patterns to create reusable designs that can be mapped to different platforms. Without this, cross-platform application designers are not properly applying design solutions or taking full benefit of the power of patterns as reuse blocks, resulting in poor performance, poor scalability, and poor usability. Furthermore, the designer may "reinvent the wheel" when attempting to implement the same design for different platforms based on their own understanding of the system application requirements. Design patterns are a vehicle for capturing and reusing good designs while detailing a motivating example on how design patterns can be composed to create a generic application design. In addition, patterns are a suitable means for mapping an application to new platforms while maintaining its intrinsic quality attributes and providing consistency across all platforms. Attempting to define design patterns from a development perspective is a complex task but what about the users? How do we define design patterns from a user experience perspective?

An example may be by talking to the representative user groups, asking specific questions about the product concerned to help identify the user’s motivations and emotional response to the product in question. Following a series of interviews or diary accounts of the user journey, it is then possible to transcribe each individual interview highlighting the motivations (verbs) and the emotions highlighted by each user. In doing so what you will start to see is the emergence of a pattern highlighting common motivations and emotive responses. Carrying out a cluster analysis of the common verbs and emotive references will not only inform the developers of the components required during the early stages of the analysis but more importantly help to build the personas of each representative user group and provide insights to the taxonomy or classifications of information categories required from an interface perspective. This does not need lots of technology or technical understanding just good observation and a pile of post-it notes to help build up a pattern and identify the common elements of the user experience that need to be created or resolved.

Open Office: Coping with Online Stampedes

Yesterday Open Office launched it's major upgrade to its open source Microsoft Office bashing office productivity suite, version 3, and it's servers crashed in the stampede to download it. I know, I was part of that stampede.

Now this is not to have a pop at Open Office. Quite the contrary. After all, Open Office is a vast open source community undertaking, backed by Sun and IBM. It would be disingenuous, if not actually positively ungrateful to complain that when I tried to download my FREE copy, all I got was this screen …



I could complain that Apache error message is hardly suitable for public consumption: ContentHelmNoodle anyone? But that's hardly Open Office's fault.

But actually, this is a story of doing the right thing, when you're best estimates gets trampled by the crush of wildly keen users.

Step 1 Apologise
Even though Open Office are giving us a word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation tool, drawing program and maths tools for FREE, they still apologised. Of course, this is tricky to do on your website, as it's been clobbered by user demand. So you have to get a statement out to the news agencies, such as this article in The Register. Plus send emails to your user base:

All,

We must apologize. OpenOffice.org 3.0 is proving immensely,
staggeringly popular. And our site is down as a result. While we fix
things, we urge you to be patient and try again later on tonight,
tomorrow, this week. It will still be there.

Oh, by popular, we mean it: figure hundreds of thousands of users,
mostly Windows users, but also Mac OS X and Linux and Solaris users,
all trying to download it all at once.....

Cheers, and thanks for your patience,
Louis

Step 2 Clear the Boards
If you're being swamped, stop trying to swim elegantly, and concentrate on just staying afloat. Or in web terms, pull down your usual site and focus all your bandwidth on doing the one user task nearly everyone is wanting: to get their hands on the new release.
























Step 3 Return to Normal
Eventually things will stabilise and in a couple of days OpenOffice.org will return to normality.

Step 4 Tell the Story
Some people may grumble, but actually a bit of mad rush creates some incident, a marketing story to tell.

The stampede demonstrates the power of open source movement, and its continued momentum. Did Microsoft servers collapse after the release of the last version of MS Office? Not so far as I'm aware.

Stories such as this, in ZDet, talks of the opportunity for Sun and IBM and Open Office, as the global financial crisis puts more pressure on IT budgets. So having ordinary users mob the release of Open Office 3 can only add to its kudos, and the manner in which Open Office responded was just right.

e-Commerce Customer Advisor: Does My Bum Look Big In This?

On telly, Trinny and Susannah are a couple of cruel-to-be-kind school prefects, prodding and bullying their semi-willing fashion victims to accept certain fashion verities, such as:

• The 70s and/or 80s are over
  
• You're looking at 41, so stop dressing like 21
• Tatty is not the same as fashionably distressed
• Black is not the only colour
• Magic knickers can transform your body shape

Now watching someone being ritualistically humiliated is all part of the schadenfreude that is the joy of Reality TV. But in the privacy of your own PC, who would be masochistic enough to want to be jibbed and criticised?

Well the designers of Trinny and Susannah's Body Shape Calculator, which has been created to support the online store of Littlewoods Direct, understood this, and have taken a slightly softer approach.



Which is good … but what about The Men? Well, at last, we victims of being banished to the basement or the top floor have an opportunity to dress à la mode.

Being a fine figure of a man, let me share with you the experience … Step one, pop in those vital statistics. Remember, if you lie at this point, you're only lying to yourself. So here's mine.



Somewhat prescriptively, you have to have to admit to being either big, short or skinny. Whatever happened to hunky? Anyhow, so let's pretend I'm "big" then.

"Ask" Trinny and Susannah's advice brings up a set of outfits, classified by casual, smart and formal, with a set of style tips.



Apparently I should wear my top buttons undone to create a slimming vee-neck, and having a jacket with big pockets will divert attention from my hypothetical big tum. While puffa jackets are a huge no-no.

What you are meant to do, after browsing around and poking about the various bits of advice, some of which is the same and some of which differs per outfit, is select some of the items offered to have a look at them. So I selected some trousers.



Now my selection was a bit random, as I couldn't really see the trousers very clearly in the thumbnails offered. And as you can see, when looking at the trousers all together, you still cannot really see them especially well either.

But the most surprising thing is the sudden appearance of the "go to basket" button. Whooooaaaaa! Steady on! I was just having some fun with Trinny and Susannah, trying out stuff and getting some tips and suddenly I'm being asked to buy stuff!? This is not what Jared Spool called a Seducible Moment.

I don't know

• if this is available in my size
• if this is available in my colour
  (I'm autumn colours, apparently)
  
• how this will go with other things
• what brand is it
• what material is it made of
  
• even that most basic of purchasing questions: how much does it cost!
• or most basic of all, what does it really look like, aside from a small 4cm high (on my screen) single angle photo
  

So I'm really not disposed to put any of these things into any thing that implies a commitment to buy. Now as it happens, the "basket" gives me an opportunity to answer some of these questions.



Though you'll notice that the price still isn't shown, until you select your waist, inside leg and colour.

You'll also notice that the basket includes no images at all now. So which trouser detail is which?

You can, one-by-one, click on the enlarge button, which pops up a new window, which is 7½cm high (just less than half the screen height) … hardly eye-popping in your face.

So you're chief guide is a set of terse descriptions, such as "Brushed cotton twill trouser with plain bottoms" and "Bedford cord western style pants with zip-fastening".

Oh yes, Bedford cord … I think we all know what that is, er?

So, what started off as a playful piece of fun, and a rather nice attending to men's fashion needs (so often neglected to a poor second place), suddenly became a jarring sales experience, in which I was being asked to commit to buying things I didn't properly understand. Which is a shame.

Maybe I should try Gok Wan instead…

Play.com shopping process misses a trick

As the nights grow longer, the temperature drops and Christmas begins to close in, this year I decided to try and be organised and start my Christmas shopping early. Doing my shopping online has always been attractive because it allows me to get a few bargains and avoid going out in the cold weather. This way I can browse at my leisure from home, have everything delivered to a convenient address and it doesn't even have to cost me a penny extra in postage in some cases!

After a bit of browsing I decided the best option would be to shop with Play.com and noticed that they proudly display their recent title of 'Best Online Retailer 2008' which was awarded to them by Which? This certainly is warranted as I have shopped with Play many times and always enjoyed the experience. However, I have recently noticed that they have made one of the biggest mistakes in retailers terms when it comes to their shopping process. It appears that the site will not save any items added to your basket over a long period of time. Twice now I have added some Christmas presents and decided to go back the next day to either add some more or checkout and pay. Both times I have logged in to find my basket empty, leaving me with no other choice than to add each item all over again. This seems like a lost opportunity in increasing sales. It is not uncommon for customers to browse over a period of time, adding items each time they return to the site.

Grocery shopping sites in particular are aware of these customer habits and all ensure that any items added to a basket are saved. Without doing this, customers are less likely to remember which items they had in their basket from previous visits and as a result, unlikely to spend as much. From a personal point of view I find it irritating to have to add items each time I log in and although I will still shop with Play, this could put other customers off. It seems that no matter how successful online retailers are, there is always room for improvement!

Forms behaving badly

I recently completed a usability study on a bespoke software application. All participants involved in the study preferred to navigate the form input screen using the tab key. Users quickly discovered that the navigation was restricted due to the form “behaving unexpectedly”. When tabbing from one input field to another and attempting to select an item from a drop down menu list, the page reloaded and posted back to the server as the focus moved on to each menu list option. As a result, the system performance was reduced dramatically and users were unable to navigate efficiently to the next input field until the previous “postback” actions were complete.

It would appear that on further inspection that JavaScript “postback” events had been attached to drop down list boxes which produced the unexpected behaviour e.g. when the user tabbed through a menu listbox and used the up–down arrow keys to navigate through the list, a JavaScript “onchange” event fired every time the focus moved onto another item in the list, causing the form to “postback” to the server unintentionally and unnecessarily. As a result the system speed and performance was reduced as was the task efficiency.

If a drop down list selection is required, position a button next to the drop down list so that the ‘”postback” event is only carried out once the item has been selected from the menu list. This will prevent many “postback” actions being sent back to the server every time the focus changes from one list menu item to the next. This will also reduce the response times endured by the user each time the focus moves onto the next list item and as a result increase the task completion and satisfaction rates.