Uffenorde.com

I had to smile as I was sifting through some old prototypes for a project I’m working on. The smile grew a bit as I did a double-take on a name inside the “Name” field text box. It was Marcia Brady.

I recalled preparing this prototype for a meeting in which several upper management figures would be attending and I wanted to make it memorable and as fun as I could without compromising the professional nature and atmosphere of the presentation.

The prototype was an early version for an online loan application form intended to be completed by a dealer. Pretty dry stuff at face value if you ask me, however, sprinkling in some American sitcom celebrities brought some much needed smiles, jokes and laughter throughout the meeting.

During the meeting key stakeholders were able to navigate verbally much more effectively because the names I used in particular stages were far more memorable than your typical “John” or “Jane Doe”. This facilitated effective communication and (I believe) made the meeting shorter.

While not ground breaking, I’ve found this subtle technique of sprinkling tasteful humor into otherwise dry material to be very valuable and takes very little effort.

Click image for 1920×1080 resolution.

Bad Costco…bad, bad Costco. I recently visited Costco.com to refill a prescription. As I was perusing the “Preferences & Health” tab I stumbled over a very sneaky and “Dark Pattern“-esque tactic.

You can see in the image four typical uses of the checkbox form control but one sticks out. It conveniently omits the word “Yes” and is unusually more verbose than the surrounding checkboxes.

Reading the second sentence reveals Costco’s dark intention. It reads (emphasis added): “Check here if you do not want to receive these exclusive emails.”

The reason this is so sneaky is because its behavior is counter-intuitive. Checking a checkbox is typically a “positive” and “active” action. In other words, checking it indicates you want it to do something. Costco is intentionally sliding this checkbox (unchecked) in between other check boxes that they have found to be typically “checked” because they know most will leave defaults alone and skim over the rest.

Costco’s marketers love this tactic because it means more eyes on the ads they send out which, of course, means an increase in revenue.

Furthermore, if anyone complains Costco can simply indicate that they offered customers the option to “opt out”, which they did, but they did it without the customer’s trust in mind.

As of this blog post’s date I have submitted an email to Costco about my feelings regarding this dirty tactic accompanied with my disappointment in Costco’s policy.

I have also submitted an entry under the “Trick Questions” category on wiki.darkpatterns.org.

I am more than happy to write a follow-up posting if Costco takes any further action.

So, what say you Costco?

Wise words from my father given to me some time ago when I was waffling between two somewhat large purchases. Rather than making rash and impulsive decisions (which I enjoy doing), by going home to sleep on it  “we clear our minds and relieve ourselves of the immediacy (and accompanying stress) of making a decision“. Grohol, John M. , PSYD, “Why ‘Sleeping On it’ Helps,” <http://www.livescience.com/health/091026-sleep-on-it.html> (October 26th, 2009). Grohol goes on to say it helps us organize our memories, process the information of the day and solve problems.

I agree. I have employed this tactic frequently in my endeavors as a web designer. Tasked with deploying solutions to myriad design problems I often get entrenched in my cubicle with headphones on, trance music full blast, inspirational wallpapers and sites on hand ready to distill their hidden wisdom only to be frustrated for the next 6 hours as a decent solution evades me. Disengaging from the problem always proves helpful but I’ve never been able to predict just how long of a reprieve is necessary for the unconscious creative juices to flow. Sometimes it’s minutes, others, it’s days.

Recently I’ve been matching a new web application we’re developing to an existing financial institutions’ website brand. The color palette I have to work with is a rich red and blue with a lighter desaturated blue as an accent color on a white background (very patriotic-like indeed). Try as I might, I was incapable of applying the existing institution’s color palette in any kind of aesthetic manner to the elements of our web application. Sounds easy enough, I was only dealing with 3 colors after all and I’ve re-branded more sites than I can count. I tried manipulating every element for hours but just wasn’t satisfied. So, I threw up my hands, hit the ‘Windows+D’ key, opened Firefox and began reading my tech blogs. It was time to disengage.

That was yesterday. I came in this morning and within an hour and half I had found a winning brand design. Funny how that works.

Now, if only I could convince my boss after receiving every assignment that I would need to “go sleep on it.”

Especially poignant when the CEO of a company (who was a farmer) rejects a new, modern, and more usable experience for the old and dated 1990′s look.

Old people (who know better) shouldn’t be in charge of UI…period….EVER!

Sometimes I feel like screaming this…

I don’t care if you like it! I want to know if you understand it!

Click image for 1920×1080 resolution.

I hail from a time when Notepad and Netscape were the development tools used by those interested in attempting to merge their way onto the information highway. Some of you reading this may be smiling right now recalling how exciting it was to publish a custom made homepage filled with all manner of abominations like distracting animated .gif’s, blinking and rotating bullets points, horizontal rules made up of a fuse and bomb exploding again, and again, and again, and my personal favorite; huge rounded 50 pixel radius pill buttons with a hover state that displaced all other content on the screen. To illustrate my point, I’ve adorned my post with abominations of the past for your reading pleasure.

Back then it didn’t matter that everything was entirely unusable, frustrating, and took so long to load that we’d go make a sandwich while we waited though proud owners of a brand new 28.8k modem (I actually grew up using a 2400 baud modem). Everything then was new and exciting. The word usability hadn’t yet been conceived (okay maybe it had, but it wasn’t widely known). To experience your screen shake madly or snow start to fall across your browser window completely obscuring your view  due to some innovative JavaScript was an experience that made you wonder with awe at just how “cool” the Internet was. Seemed that anything was possible, access to information was at our fingertips and discovering it was an adventure. Not to mention all the “COOL LINKS” that were dying to to be clicked on.

I am grateful that the few aforementioned abominations have, for the most part, gone into hiding but why don’t we see them anymore? I think that the “honeymoon” phase with the Internet is over for most of us. It takes far more to impress with regards to what Internet technology can do for us. Furthermore, I think most of us “use” the Internet rather than “surf” it nowadays. Access to information is so immediate and prevalent that when we do decide to “use” the Internet we want to get in and get out.

I’m definitely not saying that there is nothing cool on the Internet worthy of surfing for, but what I am saying is that people are expecting more from their encounters with it. They expect to get what they want faster and quicker. This means that they are recognizing when progress of achieving their goals is being interrupted. For example, being distracted by a bomb exploding between every paragraph or experiencing vertigo just by glancing at an animated .gif wildly out of control in the sidebar.

People now easily formulate an opinion based solely on the appearance of or their experience with a company’s website. This is goods news for everyone because it means that bad usability practices are being tolerated less. The usability field is still in its infancy and many companies (including the one I work for) have been slow to realize its value. According to Jakob Nielsen we’re making progress in usability with regards to websites at a rate of ~6% per year (over the past decade). However, he does note that at that rate it will take about 74 years to reach acceptable user experience quality. Nielsen, Jakob, “Usability ROI Declining, But Still Strong,” <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/roi.html> ( January 22nd, 2008 ).

Believe it or not there are those that would embrace the resurrection of the animated .gif and gigantic pill buttons but I think they are becoming the minority. Efforts placing more focus on the user experience is becoming increasingly popular and reliable studies proving it has positive bottom line influence on companies are surfacing.

I believe that as technology standards and Internet users’ expectations evolve and access to the Internet becomes ubiquitous (assuming it’s not already) that usability will become paramount and will no longer be considered an “optional investment” that “just takes more time away from development”. Someday user experience designers won’t have to fight upper management to invest in usability but that upper management will have to fight their customers who demand better use experiences.

p.s.

See what I mean about the horizontal rules?

Those of you who understand the symbolism and history behind the “Fish” symbol may appreciate this wallpaper a bit more…or you may think it’s sacrilegious. Either way, I had fun making it.

I had heck of a time creating the background pattern taken from the Android logo (it’s the robot’s head).

Originally I created the fish symbol in Illustrator and then brought it over to Ps to chrome it out.

There’s a faint texture that I created as the background of the lettering inside the fish that was originally meant for a much larger scale, but tweaking it gave exactly the look I was after.

Update: November Calendar Included

I’m a die hard Android fan. I can’t stand Apple’s “Big Brother” attitude and will avoid buying their products like the plague (even though their design is top notch). I realize, however, Google is no angel company either. That said, I made this wallpaper to express my undying loyalty to Android and its developers.

Click the image for 1920×1080 resolution.

Credit goes to Google for the Android logo and to conrados for the fist images.

The following was paraphrased from GUI Bloopers 2.0.

Basic Principle #9

Try it out on users, then fix it!

Most people in the computer industry have heard the saying “test early and often.” Although there are many different kinds of testing to which computer software and hardware can be subjected, the kind that is relevant to this book is usability testing—trying a product or service out on the people who are like the intended users to see what problems they have in learning and using it. Such testing is extremely important for determining whether a design is successful, that is, whether it helps users more than it hinders them.

Usability testing has two important but different goals: one informational, the other social.

Informational goal

The informational goal of usability testing is the one most people are familiar with: find aspects of the user interface that cause users difficulty, and use the exact nature of the problems to suggest improvements. This goal can be accomplished with a wide variety of testing and data-collection methods, some expensive and time consuming, some cheap and quick.

Social Goal

The social goal of usability testing is at least as important as the informational goal. It is to convince developers that there are design problems that need correcting. Developers often resist suggestions for change, partly because of the time and effort required and partly because the need to improve a design suggests that whoever designed it did a poor job. To achieve a testing’s social goal, it is most effective to have developers watch usability tests, either live or on video.

Emphasizing the social goal of usability testing has benefits beyond convincing developers to fix usability problems. It also makes developers more accepting of the idea that usability testing is an essential development tool rather than a way to evaluate GUI developers. Programmers who initially resist usability testing often become “converts” after witnessing a few (painful) tests. In later projects, they actively solicit usability tests as a way to get feedback.

Recap of the nine principles:

1. Focus on the Users and their Tasks, not on the Technology
2. Consider function first, presentation later.
3. Conform to the users’ view of the task
4. Design for the common case
5. Don’t Distract Users from their Goals
6. Facilitate Learning
7. Deliver Information, not Just Data
8. Design for Responsiveness
9. Try it out on users, then fix it!