Category — Wireframe Software

The Plane Finder app is undoubtedly a remarkable display of augmented reality technology, an emerging class of apps for smartphones which attempt to interface with the environment by overlaying digital information on top of the real world.  The fact that the simple act of pointing your phone at a distant jet in the sky can disseminate all of the above-mentioned information in seconds is unarguably extraordinary but… is it necessary?  As apps continue to churn out at a record pace, it is becoming more and more apparent that some apps are just plain frivolous or outlandish to some smart phone users.  Why, for example, do we need an app to tell us so much detailed information about a plane flying above our heads?  How often do you really take note of the planes flying over your head, other than to notice the noise (if it is even close enough to be audible)? How many people are really going to use this app or will they just download it for the novelty of the first few tries and then forget about it when the charm has worn off? This seems to be the new business model that some app designers are following. It’s the novelty and fascination of the next great app, the excitement about a new interface design, or simply the child in us that drives this trend in mobile applications. It is one thing to have an eternally handy app for your city’s public transportation system, or for Facebook, Twitter etc.  But an app to identify planes flying overhead? This development may seem silly to some, but it appears to work. The creators of the Plane Finder app should be applauded for their ingenuity and achievement but one can’t help but wonder not only what app developers will come up with next, but also who will actually need it.

Although Nokia and Intel’s new MeeGo operating system is still in the development phases, Nokia has been releasing periodic images of screenshots of the user interface design and recentlyeven released a video of the OS’ user interface, a marketing strategy most likely employed to whip up product hype and whet the appetites of users.  MeeGo is a software environment comprised of Linux-based tools which use familiar user interface designs and run on mobile devices such as smartphones, netbooks and tablets. The smartphone user interface is one of the newest additions to the MeeGo, and it is open to customization which will likely give it a competitive edge in the UI design crowd.

Samsung and LG have apparently recognized that if they want to compete with the iPhone and its popular smartphone brethren, they are going to have to put a lot more focus on vamping up their mobile user interface designs. So after a somewhat desultory start in the smartphone game, the two Korean companies are taking a scholarly approach to breathing new life into their mobile UI designs by enlisting the services of two university professors.  Jung Ji-Hong, a former professor at Visual Communication Design at Kookmin University, will join Samsung as Vice President of their Mobile Design Group.  At LG, Lee Kun-pyo will head up the Design Management Center as Executive Vice President.  Kun-pyo is the former dean of the Department of Industrial Design at Korea Institute of Advanced Technology and comes to LG with an expertise in user interface and human centered design.

Although Samsung and LG are the second and third largest handset manufacturers in the world behind Nokia (Tech Crunchies), both companies have struggled to find success (or maybe a better way to put it is their place) in the smartphone market.  The Samsung Galaxy S has been relatively fruitful but in comparison to the iPhone and Blackberry consumer feeding frenzy, both companies haven’t exactly been able to bait the waters with their products.   The hiring of UI/UX design experts shows that Samsung and LG not only acknowledge their smartphone weakness, but also concede that user interface design strategies need to be the crux of mobile product marketing and sales.  The fact that the UX/UI experts come from universities indicates that both companies want to be at the cutting edge of new developments in the UI/UX design worlds.   LG already plans to release a line of Optimus smartphones and both companies plan to have Android tablets by the end of 2010.  Time will tell if the UID academic infusion translates to smartphone success.

The Places feature’s default loophole is a risky move for Facebook considering the Privacy Settings firestorm they have been weathering this past year.  It seems as though they have not learned an important usability lesson: Comfortability. Features that have the potential to impact a user’s privacy should not be default settings; users should have to activate them.  If a user freely chooses to have an operational Places feature then they are responsible for the accompanying risks but they should not be punished by the default settings trap.   If Facebook and all of your friends can know your location or even make up your location then is there really any space left for privacy at all? How comfortable can a user be with a user interface that is deceptive?

When George Orwell predicted that future technology would one day police all of our activities, he wasn’t too far off from the truth.  Needless to say that many services like Facebook offer significant benefits to user, and although many users around the world happily and voluntarily join such services, people today would be hard pressed to escape technological monitoring from passport control to personal banking.  Although it is a far stretch to compare Facebook to Big Brother, it is worth pondering what Orwell himself would think about the social networking site’s ability to pervade nearly every aspect of our lives.  He might actually be quite impressed.

This is the second part of my blog on the memorability of interface designs.

What factors make an interface design more memorable?

According to TNL.net, there are two main factors that make a user interface design intuitive and memorable. One of these is through the use of visual cues. The very first thing that users are always confronted with is, obviously, the interface design that they lay eyes on. A good degree of visual cues are needed in order to allow users to scan and understand, for example, a web page quickly. Icons, symbols and other visual cues allow the user to make related associations with the task at hand. For example, when a user sees the „Home“ icon that looks like a small house he will be able to make the association, intuitively, that this icon will take him to the homepage. Visual cues that are logical and familiar to users allow them to make logical and familiar associations that make the user interface more memorable.

This applies not just to software but also to hardware ranging from microwaves to cars and can be traced back to Ivan Pavlov and the Behaviorism paradigm of Psychology. While performing an action on a user interface design, a user may often receive an unexpected reaction. If a positive emotional response is elicited from the user the chances are higher that the user will remember how the action was performed and what result occurred. In the same vein, an action that elicits a negative emotional response will also be remembered more easily by the user. No feedback whatsoever does not do much to engender the formation of new memories! The point is, both reactions make the feature more memorable because we tend to remember our emotional response to unexpected reactions. Of course, you might try to ensure that it is positive emotional responses rather than a negative one that reinforces the behavior.

Testing user interface designs for memorability

User input is needed in order to assess whether or not an interface design is memorable. An effective way to obtain user input on the memorability is to usability test the interface design. A good method is to assess how users use and remember your interface design by sitting them down in front of it and having them run through it. You should do this in several sessions. It is important that you use more than one user, as all users do not remember system tasks in the same way. You should do several rounds of testing, spacing the “run-throughs” by minutes, hours, and maybe even a few days. Note both the users’ unexpected reactions and their intuitive reactions to the visual cues. Interview and record your users’ feedback about the memorability of the interface design or have them fill out a survey — it is your choice how to collect the data. After you have obtained initial results, you can make the initial necessary changes to your interface design. Repeat iteratively until the user feedback shows that your interface design has attained a satisfactory level of memorability.

One of the most common methods of gathering user experience feedback is to simply interview users about their understanding of a given interface design.  In theory, interviews should give you all the information you need to make the necessary changes to your user interface design in order to optimize the usability of your site or app for users.  However, interviewing is not always a foolproof method for eliciting reliable user experience feedback.  This is because users often tell you something different than what they have actually done with an interface, or maybe give you false information as to how they feel about the interface. Thus, there are pros and cons to interviewing users.  Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox gives some advice about how to navigate the pros and cons of user interviews. We will discuss some of his ideas below in order to help you construct an interview process that acknowledges both the benefits and limitations of the method.

The Pros

According to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, interviews are most helpful when you want to “explore users’ general attitudes or how they think about a problem.”  Interviews help you get the big picture from your users and with this information you will be able to tell if there are any glaring problems with your interface design.  Interviews will also help you establish what your users think of the interface design in general, both their positive and negative attitudes.

One interviewing method that Nielsen asserts is quite helpful is the critical incident method.  This is an exploratory interview method which requires you to “ask users to recall specific instances in which they faced a particularly difficult case or when something worked particularly well.” Users often remember specifics, especially when something went well or something went very wrong. Posing users this question will allow you to gain some valuable information about the specifics of your user interface design, specifics which you can compare and contrast among the different users you are interviewing.

In part 2 of this 2-part blog post I shall look at Search Engine Optimization and tree-testing in relation to findability.

Search Engine Optimization can help improve the findability of your website

How you organize the structure of your website’s content as well as how you implement web standards and conventions is important for search engine optimization (SEO) because search engines can only react to standard representations. In addition, the organization of your interface design affects its SEO ranking. Considering that search engines are arguably the most commonly used online tool, a website’s search ranking can potentially make or break a website. Simply put, search engine optimization is the art of science of increasing traffic to a given website. This is done by optimizing structure, text content, photos and videos to increase a website’s visibility on search engines and other web 2.0 portals such as Facebook. Another way of doing this is through interface design whereby a website appears the same in different web browsers, and without errors. After all what good is it to create a wonderful interface design if it may appear broken to a significant number of users. Using a number of different portals to generate more inbound traffic from different sources also results in higher search engine rankings which begets more traffic. Other considerations of SEO, even though they don’t necessarily have much to do with interface design proper, include incorporating particular keywords and key phrases even and recoding a website to make it more crawl-able by search engines.

Usability tests can help determine the findability of your site content

As mentioned in part 1 of this blog, the best way to determine the findability of your interface design’s content is to conduct iterative usability testing. One usability method that is particularly helpful when evaluating and optimizing findability is tree testing. The information architecture of interface designs is in most cases organized in hierarchies. These are referred to as trees (with subsections “branching” out). Tree testing, also known as card-based classification or reverse card sorting, seeks to find out how well users are able to find information within a website’s hierarchy. Remember, tree testing differs from traditional usability testing in that it is not done on a wireframe prototype or the website itself but on using cards (or software) of a simplified text version of the site structure. A typical tree test is as follows:

1.    Users are given a “find it” task (e.g. look for the breakfast menu).
2.    Users are then shown a list of the top topics on the website (as they might appear in the main navigation)
3.    They choose one and then are shown a list of subtopics (such as in a sub-menu of a navigation)
4.    They continue choosing, backtracking if necessary, until they have found a topic that completes their task.
5.    The test conductor has the user repeat this process several times with several different tasks
6.    After several users have completed the tree test, the results are analyzed by the design and development team.

For the reasons mentioned above, findability should be an important consideration of every interface designer.

Copying or paying tribute to the Bing interface design?

While it is no doubt an excellent idea to reinvigorate a user interface (especially when you make an images interface all about the images), the changes to Google Images are not necessarily new per se.  Google’s new interface design is strikingly similar to Bing.com’s Images user interface design—in fact it is almost uncanny.

Of course it would be unfair to call Google unoriginal in its interface design choices.  After all, it’s the details of an interface design that matter in the world of good usability.  In this case, Google seems to have picked up a good interface design idea and improved it through yet a more prominent display of the images through their larger size.  Everything that rises out of the creative world is influenced by what came before it.  Good ideas are infectious and if Google took a page from Bing’s website then that means they obviously liked what they saw.  That is the give and take in the world of interface design, painting, even literature.  Variations of what is working well for someone else.  Still, time will tell how well Google’s users respond to the new changes.  But for now, Google continues to surf the wave of internet success, being authentic in many instances, but also not afraid to concede and adopt good interface design solutions.

But now let’s look at the interface design features that struck me: OnLive’s interface design is, in a word, cinematic. Upon starting the program a small overlay opens up requesting log in details. The background of the menu screen is made up of a number of small screens with running games, supposedly being played that moment by other users. The layout of the interface design is nicely suited to video games as there aren’t too many menu options, and it’s clearly designed to be easily navigable with a control pad. Choosing one of the menu options, such as the Marketplace game store, reveals breadcrumbs at the top of the interface design – one of those usability best practices. When acquiring a demo, the top right of the interface design layout of the games menu displays how much more time users have to play the game until they must purchase or rent the full-version. All in all, this is an interface design that is refreshing and easy-to-use, which is a great plus with online gaming services.

OnLive’s greatest challenge to date is keeping the lag down to a minimum of micro seconds. When streaming video, buffering time of 3 seconds is manageable. While playing a video game, 3 seconds could well mean game over. OnLive feels to me like a service intended for use two years from now (ready for use in Japan). The service is currently only available in the US where only 25% of broadband connections are faster than the 5 Mbps threshold needed to use it. Despite this, the service holds promise, working and sporting the same interface design on multiple formats such as PC, Mac, Linux, TV and even the iPad, which may make it a triumph of interface design.

New to Safari’s interface design is the Reader function which can be activated when Safari detects that you’re on a web page with an article. In that case, a grey button called Reader appears in the address bar at the top of the interface design. Clicking on it renders the button purple to show that the button is turned on. An overlay appears over the website with the article clutter-free along with the corresponding picture (if any). Onscreen controls for zoom, print and email are integrated into the Readers interface design. An interesting new feature is the introduction of Extensions (a feature other major browsers have had for a long time now). It will be interesting to see how extensions might improve Safari’s interface design and popularity further.