Enable Usability

I was one of the “lucky” people to get my hands on an iPhone 3G last week (lucky = standing in a never-ending line for 7 hours).

Of course, I LOVE the phone. It really is an amazing piece of technology. I love a lot of the apps, too. Especially Google Maps – the GPS is awesome.

What I don’t love is AIM. Don’t get me wrong, the interface is extremely usable and well designed, like most things designed for the iPhone/iTouch. However, the serious flaw is that it is not practical at all. Why?

Because you have to be inside the application to receive instant messages.

That means that I cannot exit AIM to, say, check my email or use my phone, and still receive messages. Other mobile OS’s you can. Worked great on my Palm. I could leave my phone on standby, and I’d get notification when someone sent me an IM. Not the case on the iPhone.

For me, and most people, that totally defeats the purpose of an instant messaging program.

Thanks to my buddy, gregnnn, for reminding me how crappy AIM is

Happy times. Firefox 3 is being released today.

What does this mean? Well, for a usability tester, it means that we all have another browser to test websites in! Hurrah!

The beta releases were looking good, so I can’t wait to get my teeth into this release.

As a fun aside, you can help the guys over at Mozilla set a Guinness World Record for most downloaded software in a 24 hour period. Sign up, and they’ll let you know when the new browser is ready to download.

Recently, we have been looking for new survey software for our firm.

A lot of software has moved to a web-based interface over a desktop solution. However, over the past few months, myself and Stew have been noticing a fundamental flaw with our current web-based solution. It’s slow.

Every time you make a change using the web-based software, it takes a few seconds to update the server. So, when we program a survey, we are making hundreds of changes and all that “wait time” adds up.

We recently tried a demo of a product that runs client-side software and we were amazed. Regardless of the extra functionality that the new software contained, the speed of using the software was unbelievably fast. Since it runs right off our desktops, we have no wait/communication/pull-your-hair-out time. It’s instant (ooh, I just figured out why they named the software, Snap!)

From that point on, we could see what we were missing. What would take a whole day to program in the web-based software will take half a day in the client-side software. So, I’ve just ordered the new software – no more wait time for us.

This experience ties directly to website usability and the importance of giving the user what he or she wants quickly. Poor navigation, slow load times, jumbled information – it all impedes our progress. No matter how brilliantly your website is designed, if users can’t get what they want in a timely manner, then they will ditch you and go somewhere else.

As a self-proclaimed video game nut, it was inevitable that I would sneak out yesterday lunch time and pick me up a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV (without telling the wife, mind).

The GTA IV website was partly to blame for this. Rockstar North has done an excellent job transferring their tongue-in-cheek pop culture humor from the game to the website. I mean, I was LOLing for realz.

In a similar vein to Halo2.5, sorry, I mean Halo 3, and Project Gotham Racing 4, GTA IV includes a website-based tracking component. That way, various game statistics can be tracked by using this portal. It really adds another fun level of interaction to an already awesome game.

And this is where we get to the usability bit. The link to the “Social Club,” as it is referred, it very hard to find. I would expect to find it at the top of the page. However, it is actually at the bottom of the page, hidden below the main content. The worst part is that it actually appears below the fold, which means that many users will never know it’s there.

I reckon Rockstar should stick those menu items where they should rightfully go – at the top of the page.

On another (but related) note, I spent some time in the multiplayer last night with by buddies over at Seasoned Gamers. After I calmed down on my Cops’n Robbers addiction, I’ll see if I can write a piece on the usability of the multiplayer lobby.

I know, I know, not strictly usability.

However, every day, I look at my blog stats, and one of the most common search terms I see relates to people looking for themes for their iRiver Clix.

So, I think it’s only fair that I help those guys out.

Where to get themes

The iRiver website or the Clix instructions don’t really hint where to get themes from.

Don’t worry! The fantastic folk at www.clixhere.net have compiled a “favorites” list from sources all over the Internet. There are a couple of hundred or so themes to choose from. You may have to register to use the site, but don’t worry – it’s all painless and they don’t spam you with anything.

The direct link to the themes is here.

Also, you can visit the iRiver Korea website too. Sure, it’s all in Korean, but it’s fun downloading themes and not quite knowing what you’re going to get – I’ve got a couple of absolute beauties from there. Here is the link.

How to transfer themes to your device

1. Download the file to your desktop. It will be a .swf file (Flash file). You may have to unzip the file – some you do, some you don’t.
2. Plug your Clix into your computer using the USB cable.
3. Go to My Computer and locate the Clix.
4. Double click the Clix icon (it is shown as an external drive) top open it.
5. Copy or drag and drop your .swf file from your desktop into a folder on the Clix called “Themes”
6. Unplug the Clix and go to Display>Themes
7. Select your new theme and back out. Don’t forget to hit the Save UCI menu item (this saves your theme)
8. You’re done!

If my instructions are a little crappy, let me know and I’ll try to elaborate further.

Yesterday, a brief, yet interesting usability article was published on PC World’s website.

The article talks about the differences between men and women when it comes to mobile devices.

One thing that stands out in my mind as being an amazing finding is this:

“Women carry their phones in purses, where they bang around, so the finish needs to be durable. And it’s dark in there when they look for their phone, so it helps if the device lights up, and when they reach in and touch it, it needs to feel different. That’s why, for instance, our (Samsung) BlackJack has a leather panel on the back, to give that tactile feedback.”

Usability isn’t just about the software interface design, it’s also about how we physically interface with an object. The Blackjack feels different to the touch so it can be indentified with relative ease (I say relative, because nothing can be identified easily in my wife’s purse) simply by rummaging around a dark purse interior.

The article also reminds us, as usability testers, that we need to identify and test websites among a variety of homogenous audiences – what may be usable to one audience may be brutal for another!

Wow, I really am a bad person. Here is my blog which hasn’t seen an update in nearly two weeks.

That’s bad for usability. Why?

Well, readers might think that this is a dead blog. A project that started and never finished. Who reads dead blogs?

The whole point of a blog is to present timely information. The timeliest (yes, I just invented a word) information on this site is two weeks old. Another, “there is nothing to see here, move along” moment.

I can just look at my blog stats to see that readership has dwindled.

So, the end result is this. Bloggers and web-site owners, keep your sites up to date!

I want my MTV…lookin’ good!

It’s always fun to look back at websites to see how they have changed (or not) over the years.

Designers and developers now have more tools and techniques at their disposal then they did back in the “early days.”

Utilization of CSS has made it a lot easier for designers to keep web pages consistent in terms of look, feel and formatting (and therefore enhance usability) and more advanced authoring tools have allowed websites to tap in to rich media-driven techniques.

However, one could argue that the new design technologies could actually make websites harder to use than before. It certainly is food for thought.

Anyway, here is a great article featured on freelancing design website, WakeUpLater.com. The articles shows how some websites have changed over the years including; Amazon, Nike and Starbucks.

If you really want to start looking for old versions of websites, be sure to check out The Way Back Machine – a great repository of archived websites. You’ll be hard-pressed not to find what you’re looking for!

This article was posted in one of the gaming forums that I frequently troll. I couldn’t help laughing, and thought I’d have to share.

It was written in 1995, when the Internet was a mere pup. The article basically calls the Internet out for being a useless unedited directory of mess rather than the everyday-Joe’s-first-port-of-call-for-information as it is today.

Before I make fun of the article, I can totally see where the author is coming from. In 1995, I thought the Internet was just a slow jumble of random information, too.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

• “Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic…Baloney!”
  
• “Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.”
  
• “Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts… the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.”
  
• “Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee.”
  

I LOVE that last quote. Just love it.

I’ve been playing around with the Internet Explorer 8 Beta.

First impressions are so-so.

IE8 looks and feels a lot like its Explorer 7 counterpart. However, IE8 adds “Activities” to the browser interface (e.g. clicking the Facebook dropdown allows you to see the status of all of your buddies) and “Webslices” (portions of a web page that you subscribe to.)

At this stage, I need to be educated to the benefits of Activities and Webslices. I’m not used to using a browser in such a fashion. But, with time, I could learn to love it.

Currently, I use a web browser to search for information and log onto various web pages. I’m used to my current interface and am at ease with how I use social media. The one thing that is essential to me is speed of use…which is where the IE8 beta fails.

I don’t want to get into a browser war, I don’t care for that. I just know that my current browser, Firefox 2, kills IE8 in terms of speed a loading pages.

The good news it, IE8 is in the first stage of beta release, which means there is time to tweak, improve and act on user feedback.

Other useful browser links:

• Flock – This could be big. Social media oriented browser. Is this what Web 2.0 will look like?
• Firefox 2 – my personal fave…currently
• Firefox 3 Beta – doesn’t seem to work properly on my Vista machine
• Internet Explorer 7 – I like it, especially the interface. Just a little too slow compared to FF
• Internet Explorer 8 Beta – Certainly worth checking out
• Safari for PC – Pretty fast, I personally don’t care for the interface (and I’m an Apple lover, not hater)