As the amount of information continues to grow on the internet, it is becoming harder and harder to find stuff.

As you know, necessity is the mother of all innovation. I recently ran into searchme.com (thanks to Kim F. for the heads-up). Basically, searchme.com is a visual search engine. That’s right, a visual search engine.

This is how it works: you type in your search phrase and press enter. What happens next is a hybrid between the iTunes music slider and ask.com’s website preview option. And then some. Here are some of the neat features that I noticed right away:

• No pagination – search results are loaded right on the page using AJAX, and they keep loading as you keep scrolling
• Highlight keywords – each search result image highlights the keywords matching your search criteria
• Traditional results – this tool also allows you to toggle between full screen visual search results and traditional text-based search results

You have to play with it to really understand how it works. I highly encourage you to test it out and think about how web design can change if this catches on… how can this change search engine optimization?

Remeber, the eye and the mind can process images a lot faster than it can process text. People also gravitate towards “credible” websites. Credibility is instantaneously established when a user looks at the page’s design. All these factors stack on the side of searchme.com. Let’s keep an eye on these guys and see where this goes.

Labels: Design, search engine optimization, search engines, usability

There is an interesting article published on Boxes and Arrows a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to share with you. The article is titled “Extreme User Research” and it’s by Daniel Lafreniere.

Extreme User Research talks about gathering user data by interviewing “surrogate” users, not users themselves. This to save time and money.

We’ve had great success with similar techniques, it’s great to see that procedural patterns are beginning to develop around these activities. It becomes easier to convince clients that stuff like this is a good idea when more and more IAs are following a similar path to user need/behavior discovery.

As discussed in the article, the benefit of doing stuff like this is also to create data and knowledge that backs your design decisions. When just user surrogates are interviewed, however, we are missing out on several opportunities. Yes, it’s a lot more work and more money to interview real users and other constituents, but if it’s possible, we should always aim to collect data from them as well. It makes the overall picture more complete and it gives people (especially if you fold in key stakeholders into the interview process) a sense of participation – which leads to buy-in. The extra work (even if you have to eat the time) is worth the extra texture, unearthed dimensions, and overall buy-in.

We normally interview different groups of people for different reasons. For example, when we do Higher Education, we interview faculty, staff, the president, deans, current students, alumni, prospective students, and so on. Each group provides different perspectives – and all perspectives are incredibly valuable. For instance, the administration will tell us “recruiting” is the priority, meanwhile faculty and staffers are internally focused on with current students and their own information concerns. These two groups often have competing interests and this interview process helps bridge the two.

I agree with Daniel, however, if there is only one group, and one group only to interview – aim for the internal group that has the most day-to-day contact with your end user. This group will often be in the best position to expose the patterns – but be careful to tease out the differences between fact and opinion.

Great piece. Read it.

Labels: information architecture, usability, user experience, user research

Boxes and Arrows has a great article about Searching. The article is worth reading and the discussion thread is fantastic.

Stephen Turbek’s “Advancing Advanced Search” is a great chronicle of the good, the bad and the ugly on about advanced searches. My favorite part is when he writes about how we ended up where we are. “In the quest to make web sites more usable, we settled on a pattern of a clean, minimal search box with a link to an advanced search page. Jakob Nielsen recommended, ‘use an intimidating name like ‘advanced search’ to scare off novice users from getting into the page and hurting themselves.’”

Stephen dissects advanced searches, parameter searching, tagging, faceted, filtering, and progressive disclosure. All have their strengths and weaknesses.

In my experience designing interactions for higher education, financial services, b2b, healthcare and non-profit, search in general is a tool used by people who can’t find what they are looking for right away or people who know precisely what they are looking for and poses the vocabulary to get good results.

Regardless of simple or advanced search, search is used to find stuff (no duh, I know). My question is this: how would progressive search or even super-duper-complicated searches like the one found on google.com help users find the same information the second time they go looking for it?

Granted, this question is irrelevant for sites where content is transient, such as Expedia or Ebay, and for sites where the search index is always changing such as Google and Yahoo – but I insist this is an important question for sites where content is more fixed than it’s not.

Progressive searching could be a great way to help people find what they are looking for, but my gut tells me that its implementation would be more useful and appropriate for transient content.

Different sites have different search needs. Some sites don’t (and shouldn’t) have searches at all. Healthcare

Labels: boxes and arrows, progressive disclosure, search engines, usability

It’s the holiday season, and spam is at an all time high. I normally delete most of the spam that makes it into my inbox, but for some reason, I decided to click on one of many J. Crew promo emails. And I was astonished by what I found.

Labels: information architecture, marketing, spam, usability

Recently, a client asked us to put together a list of high level “dos” and “don’ts” for usability testing. It has taken us several years to get good at usability testing – so this list of tips is not meant to replace an expert facilitator, it’s simply meant to provide a bit more insight.

1. Remind the subject that you are not testing them, that you are testing the website.
2. Don’t lead. If the subject doesn’t understand a question, try to ask it differently without giving the answer away. This is particularly important when testing “labels” or the site’s navigation options.
3. Be friendly and approachable, to diffuse some of the anxiety and tension experienced by the subject, but don’t overdo it or you will end up swaying the results in the other direction. The goal is to neutralize the artificial setting.
4. If an answer to a question seems vague or if the subject seems unsure, take the opportunity to probe by asking follow up questions.
5. Ask subjects to “think outloud” when they are trying to execute a task.
6. Be patient. Silence is ok at first (for five to ten seconds), then ask the subject to “think out loud”.
7. When a user asks you a question, don’t just answer it. Think about what they might be really asking and don’t give them the answer to the test question. If you are able to provide an answer to their question without answering the test question, answering their question is harmless. Most of the time, you can redirect by answering their question with another question. For example, a participant could ask, “Do I find “xyz” by clicking on “abc”? The best answer to this type of questions is, “What would you expect to find after clicking on "abc"?”
8. Some of the usability questions are testing the labels being used by the site’s navigation. In these cases, let users tell you what they expect to find behind a certain click before allowing them to click on the link.
9. Be consistent and encouraging as you transition from one task to another – regardless of whether they performed the task successfully or not. Use the following transitions: Great, let me ask you another question; Ok, let me ask you another question; Good, let me ask you another question. Never be overly negative or overly positive, just keep it moving with some encouragement.
10. When the subject gets stuck on a question or task, you have rephrased the question in a non-leading fashion, and you feel ample time has lapsed, simply drop the question and move forward. Example: Ok, let me ask you this other question.

Happy hunting!

Labels: usability, usabilty testing, user experience

The most compelling attribute about the iPhone is the touch screen and gestures that control it. Why? Because interfacing with this device is different, and some argue, more natural than other devises.

User experience and usability will continue to only see marginal improvements until onscreen interfaces can receive a different and more engaging form of input, as demonstrated by the iPhone.

As it turns out, the touch screen taping, dragging and gesturing are not all that unique or new. It’s known as “Surface Computing” which uses multi-touch and multi-users input and has been around since the 80’s.

This technology and interface is good for photos, videos, maps, etc… basically, anything that requires a simple command in order to do something, such as “play” or “pause”. More complex applications are sure to follow, especially in the military.

Microsoft has been working on something similar since 2001. However, their approach is more encompassing and integrated – it is its own software/hardware platform.

Microsoft Surface is a “me too” technology – for the most part, until you take into consideration the multi-device interface. Imagine putting your digital camera on the Microsoft Surface tabletop, and immediately seeing your pictures display on the screen. And then imagine dragging some pictures to your mobile phone – which you had also placed on the Microsoft Surface tabletop. No wires. Phones and cameras are just two of the devises that the Microsoft Surface tabletop will recognize… it will also recognize credit cards, music players, PDAs, etc.

I am really excited about all this because it allows for people to work together and simultaneously on the same computer, use fingers and gestures and all is done around a table – which has many positive socio-psychological attributes.

As with anything, it’s worth keeping an eye on any potential “gothas,” especially for the really young, really old, and those with low hand-eye coordination. Also, the gestures might be hard to learn – and maybe even frustrating.

Regardless, Microsoft Surface releases this winter. I want one.

Labels: Apple, iPhone, Microsoft, usability, user experience

Normally, when you click on a word on the web or on most word processing applications, the word is selected. Right?

Well, recently, I noticed that in addition to selecting a word, the New York Times website also launches a new window to display the search results associated with the double clicked word or phrase.

Here, try it. Double click on any word found in the body of the article that is not a link. It’s quite amazing, right?

This is a perfect example of significantly extending and improving function, usability and experience without eroding value or creating cognitive barriers for the user.

Granted, finding this function was a mistake. I was simply reading an article and double clicking on words that were key for me – and suddenly the pop-ups started coming. It took two or three occurrences before it dawned on me what was really happening. I went around the office and share with some people and everyone was consistently blown away.

In their defense, they keyed off a common user pattern: the double-click-as-you-read-thing – it turns out, I am not the only one that does it. Secondly, the have a note (albeit lost in the texture of the page) that reads “Tips: To find reference information about the words used in this article, double-click on any word, phrase or name. A new window will open with a dictionary definition or encyclopedia entry.”

The information provided in the search is incredibly useful, too. It offers related articles, dictionary definition, political dictionary definition, historical relevance, and much more.

Here’s a tip of the virtual hat to the NYT interactive group.

Labels: Design, New York Times, usability, user experience

Jakob Nielsen and Coyne performed an eye tracking study to test some of his theories and work. The results confirmed many of the things that we already knew, and then some.

First, they found that there is such a thing as writing for the web. Good web writing helps people glance, skip and find content quickly. It also helps people remember more of the information on the page. Use bullets, headlines, subheadlines and tighter writing.

Second, they concluded that “On home pages and story level pages, eye patterns indicated that text that isn’t precise and images that aren’t information-bearing don’t get looks, amounting to wasted space.”

I buy half of this conclusion: text that isn’t precise doesn’t get looks. Umm, yeah! But how is this different than the first finding?

The second half of this conclusion assumes that space can only be used for information. That’s just incorrect. Images and space can be used for a lot of different reasons, including as design devices to channel attention to from one part of a page to another. More significantly, however, images and space are elemental design attributes that should be used to create and extend the user’s experience, and their connection to the site’s overall brand position. Finally, the nature of this study focuses on how much time people spend looking at given sections of the page. Do they know that they mind can process images a lot faster than it can read a headline or a paragraph of text? These guys are very smart, and we have a lot to learn from them, but be careful with this finding or your designs will end up looking like this.

Finally, they concluded that “images are not always worth a thousand words.” They heed a warning against using superfluous images. According to their findings, images are only well received when they are related to the content, clear, feature approachable people, and (I kid you not, this was in the report) feature areas of private anatomy. Say what?

The crotch finding strikes me as odd. Maybe I am reading this wrong, but it seems like the report is saying images are ok only when they are relevant, clear, approachable and they feature a crotch. I think many of us would agree most of this advice is good.

I am just upset that they didn’t post the original picture of George Brett. The heat signature is in my way.

Labels: usability