04.14.2008 by LukeW

Stephen Anderson’s Inspiration from the edge: New patterns for interface design presentation at IA Summit 2008 provided suggestions for new sources for inspiration for interface designs.

* Check out Stephen’s slides from his presentation
* Default Thinking: look at competitor sites in a vertical for inspiration. But your customers visit sites outside of your industry, and bring those expectations to your site.
* Default Thinking: these are the tools I have to work with (Windows controls, etc.). There are other places for inspiration like consumer electronics, games, TVs, other digital interfaces.
* Today’s hardware changes make almost anything possible.
* Software changes: silverlight, android, adobe air. Lots of desktop and Web intersection.
* Natural behaviors are better than learned behaviors. Scrollbars requires us to move down to move something up. Except when learned behavior enables us to perform better.

Inspiration Examples

* Use model of Club Penguin to organize enterprise application. Look beyond the surface- look at structure of game.
* How to accommodate all levels of users & deep customization? Floating windows can bring up controls as users need them
* Think outside the UI box. Don’t need to be constrained by it
* How to accommodate multiple workspaces? iPhone button in tiered workspaces
* Design with less space. Songza: stepped radial menu on song list.
* Picnik: tabs replaced by contextual menu items. No need to remain visible at all times. Think about moments – do you need all the features all the time?
* In the new FireFox browser, back button it bigger than forward as it gets more use.
* Think in conversations. How do we communicate context?
* Make it visual – communicate context, information
* Jing: screen capture utility
* Cookthink: integrated tag cloud browsing
* Schematic: panning across different parts of site

04.14.2008 by LukeW

Eric Reiss’ E-service: What we can learn from the customer-service gurus presentation at IA Summit 2008 walked through examples of bad customer service in action and presented strategies for avoiding similar pitfalls.

* Service is 100% about user experience. User experience is not 100% about service.
* Companies with an 83% satisfaction are in trouble. Need 90% satisfaction for long-term customer loyalty.
* Service management is a process not a program. Goes on for a long time with no finish line.
* Unhappy customers are dangerous. If you have a good experience you will tell three friends. If you are an unhappy customer, you will tell 17 people.
* Service happens at the moment of experience. Moments of truth are when and where people have customer service.
* Service is an intangible event that helps us achieve something.
* 10 reasons services are tougher to manage than products:
* Produced at the moment of delivery
* Cannot be recalled if sucks
* Experience cannot be sold or passed on
* Product cannot be demonstrated. You cannot send a sample.
* Cannot be centrally produced, inspected, or warehoused.
* Quality assurance needs to happen before production
* Help, Enhance, Fix –three ways to provide service
* If we do not demand good service, we will never receive it.
* Don’t just prevent bad things from happening. Educate people that it is not prevention, but also making wonderful things happen.

IA Summit: Linkosophy
04.14.2008 by LukeW

Andrew Hinton’s closing plenary at the 2008 IA Summit detailed why the central concerns of information architecture may be best served by a community of practice.

* In the past, computer systems were centralized, closed and directed by hierarchy. The Web allowed you to link amongst hierarchies and enabled an explosion of content.
* Computers are conduits for communication. Content is something to talk about. Information is there for our need for conversation.
* The Internet sped up conversations by allowing them to move more quickly. The Web is a culture acceleration device.
* There are cognitive limits to what we can consume. Information & conversation need to be managed and shaped so people can find what they want.
* This is the central concern of information architecture: how can we shape context and connections in information spaces.
* Community of Practice: is a group with a shared concern or passion for something. They do it better as they interact regularly. A practice is a shared history of learning. It is conversational.
* Tendency to think of communities of practice as silos. In user experience design there are no silos. User Experience has multiple facets and they are integrated.
* We experience semantic context & connection as space. Information represented as bits not atoms. Shaping context & connection is an act of architecture.
* Information architects shape structures of context & connection for info spaces.
* How to make sense of the mess of content online so people can get to conversations they need? Library Science was a great place to start making sense of this challenge.
* First order is physical, second order is metadata (signifiers of physical thing), third order (non-centralized, messy order of how individuals organize all their stuff)
* Some people think the third order of organization will consume first & second. But just because people can move things around does that negate the need for architecture.
* Just because inventory can be arranged by users does not mean there is no architecture going on. Only focusing on inventory is a red herring.
* Have to know the kind of conversation you are designing for. Do you need structure or order –if so how much?
* Possibility spaces – create frameworks in which people create meaning. We are there to create structure within which people can create their own meaning. Links, Categories, and Rules.
* Rules: access permissions, algorithmic context/architectures
* IA is not only about getting people to a piece of information
* Information is a conduit for context and connection. It’s about useful context & connections in a new kind of space.
* Each of us tends to identify with a practice – we want to be part of a group: homes for identities.
* Thing: the designed stuff. Activity: the act of working on the thing (hands on action) Role: the “hat” for the person working on this activity. Practice: shared history of learning among people who affiliate strongly with a role
* Title: a label one is called does not influence what practice you are a member of.

IA Summit: Re-experiencing information
04.14.2008 by LukeW

At the 2008 IA Summit, Lucas Pettinati presented some of his learning’s redesigning the Yahoo! registration process in his Re-experiencing information: Dealing with user-submitted data talk.

* What is the context for registration? People want instant gratification. It’s fairly easy to switch providers –low barriers to entry for online services. People will lie to protect their identity. Remembering account details is difficult.
* In order to establish an effective design, need to embrace user needs & leverage their natural behavior
* Different structures for user registration. Pre: needs unique identifier. Post: encourages return transactions. Immersive: promotes usage. Part of the way you use the product.
* Connecting with the user: build trust so can get factual data within the system
* Error & help text: fun, approachable angle to ease people into it
* Only ask necessary questions
* Only need unique identifier for communication: aol, gmail, etc.
* Banking & Finance: needs identifier for increased security
* Commerce: no meaningful ID needed for commercial transactions
* If going to use a unique identifier, make it easy for people. Use email or a common ID method for registration if you do not need a unique identifier
* Respect your user’s locale: get message to international users that a localized version of site content is available.
* Use CAPTCHA wisely: Provide audio version for the visually impaired, allow user to request a different image, Use CAPTCHA to protect commodities like usernames
* Online circle of life: register, user, forget account information
* Build a relationship prior to or with registration
* Be personable: use humor if appropriate
* Explain the value of questions if they may be seen as out of context
* Use an immersive registration process when possible

Account recovery mechanisms

* Email: quickest, assumes people have control over email
* Challenge/response model: prone to repeated errors because people lie, works best when information is up to date
* Forensic: confirms account activity and details in order to reset password: verifies actions only known by the account owner, safest method, most difficult to implement
* Email recovery: put the user in the control. Need to ask for email address from user. Confirm where it is sending
* Challenge/recovery questions change over time.
* Users want to retain privacy and may be worried about ID theft
* Put the user in control of account recovery
* Remind users that their account may contain old information
* Use human support when possible

Websites generally annoy me. I tend to keep them out of the way by using RSS readers and other objects that strip important data while leaving messy interfaces behind. The fields of Usability, User Interaction, Experience and Interface Design and Information Architecture host a bunch of battlebots out to eviscerate design travesties wherever possible.

The only problem is that many clients have a fog of war when it comes to understanding website design beyond the fact that a site “must be pretty”, or “must have flash”. Some do not understand that users are coming to the site and have only seconds to vote. A poorly designed site will have most people voting with the Back, Stumble, or Ctrl+W commands.

Enter Luke Wroblewski of Functioning Form. He’s an internationally recognized Web thought leader who has designed or contributed to software used by more than 600 million people. He is currently Senior Director of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. where he leads the design of Yahoo.com and other popular products including My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Buzz.

Luke Wroblewski says:

In today’s social, distributed, search-driven Web, customers are finding their way to Web content through an increasing number of distinct experiences. Yet when people arrive at most Web pages, the experience they get isn’t optimized for this context. Instead, the vast majority of content pages online remain more concerned with their own context than the context of their users: where did a user arrive from and where are they likely to go next? These pages remain designed as if they were primarily accessed from a Web site’s home page or a carefully thought-out selection from the site’s information architecture.”

“To address these issues and more, this talk outlines a set of best practices for Web content page design that focuses on appropriate presentations of content, context, and calls to action. Specifically: how can content be optimized to meet user expectations as they arrive from a diverse number of access points; what is the minimum amount of context required to frame content appropriately; how can the most relevant calls to action be presented to maximize user engagement? Applying these considerations enables information architects to deliver content experiences that take full advantage of emerging opportunities online and the existing assets within their Web sites.”

Resources

Download the Audio of Luke’s IA Summit 2008 Talk (Thanks to Boxes and Arrows for hosting).

Download the Slides of Luke’s IA Summit 2008 Talk

More about Luke Wroblewski:

Luke is the author of two popular Web design books: Web Form Design (2008) and Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability (2002). He also publishes Functioning Form, a leading online publication for interaction designers. Luke is consistently a top-rated speaker at conferences and companies around the world, and is a co-founder and former Board member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who lives in Portland, Oregon. You can contact her by E-mail or @caseorganic on Twitter.