The Microsoft Kinect Gaming System is set to revolutionize the world of video games as we know it and concurrently change the way people interact with their entertainment choices. Kinect, a controller free console for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console, is a novel type of user interface that corporeally integrates the user with the program—the actions on the user’s screen are controlled completely by the user’s physical movements.

The Kinect system currently really still is one of a kind in the video game world because unlike the Nintendo Wii, there is no control to hold or buttons to push, but it is likely that others will soon follow the path. The Kinect user interface is operated by three camera sensors and voice recognition technology from the four microphones within the console.  The combination of the cameras and the microphones allows the console to read the user’s full range of movements and then transfers them to the avatar on the screen.  Therefore, AI plays a significant role in the operations of Kinect, as it really is a gaming system that understands the user just as much as the user understands it.  While some may find the idea of AI disturbing (probably those who have read too many disastrous dystopian novels) for the most part, players have raved about the Kinect user interface and are eager to own one of their own.  It is safe to say that Kinect will likely be a smashing success—what will they come up with next?!

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.

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.

Facebook’s new Places tool has sparked controversy in the last few weeks with many users feeling uneasy about the possibility of their location being made public in real-time.  The Places tool allows users to “check-in” at locations that are then shared with their friends in the Facebook network.  For the most part, users are able to control when they tell other users where they are – they must actively “check-in” and change locations (as opposed to the Facebook interface automatically updating their locale).  It seems harmless enough, but Places has a loophole that has caused some users to deem it the first step towards Facebook acting as Big Brother: By default, Facebook friends can check you in wherever and whenever they want.  This means that they can possibly check you in at places that you are not, perhaps getting you in trouble not only at work but also with friends and family.

Instant Interface Design Sorrow

My mother groaned, my father wept:

Into their shopping cart unwanted things leapt,

Helpless, overcharged but arrestingly proud,

Feeling like a fiend was hid in ‘the cloud’.

Who to blame when the mouse was in my father’s hands,

Well poor usability & interface design will hurt a brand,

Placing the ‘Cancel’ button a nanometer from ‘Buy’ is not best,

Especially with a return policy worse than the rest.

The first poem is based on The Garden of Love by William Blake; the second was inspired by Infant Sorrow by William Blake. The idea behind this series of blog posts is to look at famous poems and use them to shed light on issues that affect usability, wireframes and interface design. If any of you have some suggestions of poems that you would like for us to interpolate please feel free to do so by leaving a comment with your request.

You surely remember those times in school when you had to read some of the great works of literature in school. Whether or not you liked them, here are two examples of great poetry that we have turned into usability poetry, taking the original works as inspiration and exploring some of the topics of modern usability research. Enjoy!

Ode to a Skinned Interface Design
I went to the link my friend sent me,
And I saw what I never had seen;
An ad banner was built in the midst,
Where I used to click on the screen.

With no choice but to scroll down I did frown,
My friend’s interface design was upside down,
Like a tourist with no clue I looked around lost in town,
‘Cause there were no breadcrumbs to be found.

A millisecond too long I located local navigation,
Thinking ‘they sure could use a wireframe tool for their creations’.
With findability resolved these usability problems would dissolve
And, in tow, his search engine ranking would evolve.

This is part one of my blog on the memorability of an interface design, its importance and factors to consider when working to improve memorability.

What is memorability?

Memorability, in the context of user interface design and usability, refers to the degree of an interface design’s ability to be re-used by users without them having to re-learn the system all over again. The learnability of an interface design refers to the ease of use of learning to use a system for the very first time. But will users remember how to complete tasks after a gap of days, weeks or even months? The time it takes to re-learn a system or correct mistakes from incorrect use directly diminishes productivity, not to speak of the user’s motivation. This is where an interface design has to be maximized for memorability to ensure that it is easy for users to get back into the swing of things as quickly as possible.

Why is memorability important in the context of user interface design?

As neuroscience does indeed improve, it is now known that not using certain brain functions can lead to parts of the brain that handle those functions atrophying. In other words if we don’t use the cells often enough we can loose them. So it is with the navigation of interface designs. Each interface design takes some time to get used to and operate productively. Every time a user has forgotten how to use an interface, time is wasted and/or errors occur. If your interface design has poor memorability then users may even stop using it once they return to it and find that they can’t use it expediently anymore.

What to consider when designing for memorability of an interface design

There could be an inordinate number of reasons why a user could use an interface design wrongly. The key here is that learning and memory function best when the basics of the system are intuitive. Users learn and remember an interface design based on intuition of how to use the tools given to them. Yet, intuitive interface designs can be challenging to create because, after all, people are different. What can be intuitive for one group of people may not be for another group! One has to consider the target user of an interface design to make proper decisions. Is it an interface design for a tool aimed at computer scientists who have high technical proficiency? Is it aimed at consumers without intricate IT know-how? Is it aimed at young teenagers? This is where industry conventions are your best friend. If every word processing tool uses copy paste by clicking on Ctrl + C then that should be a standard you stick with when creating an interface design for such a tool. Another crucial thing to ensure is that users of different proficiency levels can use an interface design. Systems need to be designed to keep the basics intuitive with room for more complex operations to be performed as users become more experienced.

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.

In this two part blog post I shall look at findability and the crucial role it plays in the interface design of websites. In part 1 of the blog I shall explain what findability is and what the main issues are affecting findability on a website.

What is findability?

Findability, in computer science, refers to a user’s ability to identify and then navigate the interface designs of websites or web-apps. It encompasses aspects of information architecture, user interface design, accessibility and search engine optimization. The term findability is credited to Peter Morville who remarked that “findability precedes usability. In the alphabet and on the Web. You can’t use what you can’t find.” In this vein findability is two-pronged, on one hand dealing with users finding a website. On the other hand it deals with how users find things that they are looking for, such as the help section or contact details etc., on a given website. According to Neilson Online currently there are more than 1,733,993,741 internet users generating and interacting with vast streams of data. Findability helps ensure your website doesn’t get lost in the mix and, when found, not to be deserted by frustrated users who in all likelihood won’t return, barring a thorough reworking of the interface design.
If you are developing a website with a new user interface and are interested in optimizing your website’s ability to be located by prospective users on the internet, then it is important to infuse your design process with adequate research about the above mentioned topics.

Issues affecting findability on a website
Findability concerns itself with the effort to make a user interface design easily navigable or usable and to ensure that the interface design process is fully integrated and effective. Key to findability is the organization and representation of a user interface design.  This refers to among others, the layout, the use of breadcrumbs and local navigation. Are users able to easily navigate a website and find the services they were looking for? If they found themselves in the middle of a website (which happens often as people share direct links) would they be able to figure out where in the hierarchy they were?  These issues can easily be revolved by adhering to web standards and through iterative usability testing of wireframe prototypes created with the use of wireframe tools such as pidoco. Another important issue affecting findability is the qualities of your web-site’s content and how it is geared towards search engine optimization.