SALT interactive

Alpha, Beta…Release!

Nov 02 2011

This week Google started notifying their users of the new and improved UI for their gmail product. I love gmail like so many people out there and one of the cool features is their Labs which allows you to augment the standard gmail with extra functionality. However most of these features once introduced are pretty much in a beta stage and seem to remain there forever. But none the less I use a few of the Labs features that add value such as the Preview Pane which splits your mailbox into a preview like Outlook.

You’d think someone like Google (a multi billion dollar) organisation would thoroughly test one of their flagship products? Today when I switched to the new look I was truly impressed with the overall feel but soon after my mood dropped. On gmail there’s usually a refresh button so that when you have a new mail (indicated by a number next to the Inbox link), you can press the button and it will download the latest mail. However I couldn’t find the button for the life of me. After poking around I realised that when you have selected a mail, the refresh button doesn’t show. However this actually works when I switch back to the old UI.

The new gmail UI. Do you see a refresh button?

The old gmail UI with refresh button

I play quite a few of games on my xbox 360 and in the past 2 years I’ve found maybe 2 or 3 bugs out of the 15 games I own. That’s pretty darn good if you ask me. Now some of these games are HUGE in scope and I could probably think of a million things that could go wrong and yet there’s hardly ever any problems.

So why is this such a problem for big companies? And believe me it’s not just limited to Google, I’ve seen my share of bad bugs with Microsoft apps. In my opinion one problem is that these Labs features are never taken off the beta stage and given a proper place inside of the product. If these were official features they could perhaps get more problems ironed out during their initial testing before releasing it into the wild.

When you give your users these added perks and they start using them, I think it’s only fair that they be converted into fully fledged features after some time. And for heaven’s sake – test them along with the rest of the product!

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Using Vodacom to illustrate a few UI conventions

Oct 17 2011

Recently Vodacom was acquired by the european group Vodafone and thus their website was revamped to match the new branding. Their previous website was quite terrible for a number of reasons but despite that I often used the free sms feature.

Their new website at first glance seems a lot better and it is, but there are a few things that frustrate me to no end.

Firstly the login at the top doesn’t have a remember me check box so every time I close the browser and reopen the site I have to log in again. That’s quite a frustration since it’s become the convention on almost any site that makes use of user authentication.

After logging in you are greeted with some basic account information on your current bill and a handy quick sms feature.

You should be able to see from the screenshot that there is an auto-complete list of my contacts – that’s great! But the funny part is that I’ve used the quick sms feature since the site was revamped and this was the first time the auto-complete service kicked in. So either it wasn’t implemented from the start or my connection was slow the few times I’ve tried to use it. However it would have been helpful if they put some instructional text once the textbox has focus and nothing has been typed yet to inform the user of its use. Furthermore when you design a feature you have think through a couple of user usage scenarios. So if the user’s connection is slow and the auto-complete doesn’t kick in immediately, you need a button to force a search. Most e-commerce sites use this principle.

One of the big problems the web face is when people start to move outside of well designed UI conventions. An example here is where the send sms has exactly the same appearance as the Go to sms page. The send sms under normal circumstances would have a button appearance because you are posting data. The Go to sms page rightfully looks like a hyperlink and it takes you to a new page which is correct according to convention.

This was just a quick look at some UI conventions but if we stick to them we eliminate a lot of usability errors from the start and are left with happier users. Rian Van der Merwe wrote the following in http://www.elezea.com/2011/02/design-proximity/

There are so many hard usability problems to solve that we really should make use of the easy wins. This is one of them.

The guru of web usability Jakob Nielsen has some basic heuristics to help us design a better web – http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

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Mobile OS’s: Each to his own

Sep 28 2011

We all have our biases. When I was about 15 years old I was really into some of the eighties hair bands like Def Leppard (spelled it right!), Bon Jovi and Aerosmith. Me and my friends would listen to it for hours on end and we despised any of our accolades that listened to 4 chord songs from bands like Green Day or bands without solos like Nirvana. Why? Because they weren’t as technical as Eddie Van Halen or Kirk Hammet.

I prefer windows phone 7

I’m not going to try and act like I’m not biased. I love wp7′s whole user experience. Everything from the tiles to the metro design and the simplicity. For me their motto of ‘Glance and go’ really rings true and I think Joe Belfiore is possibly my version of Steve Jobs. What this guy has done for microsoft is a miracle. I mean they sucked at UX up until now and Joe took them from windows media center to wp7′s metro. It’s so good they’re even using it on windows 8′s new touch interface.

Give credit where due

Though I love wp7 it’s not without fault and I’ve played around with android phones quite a bit as well as iphone 4. Each of them have features or experiences that are either missing or not as well implemented in their counterparts. Android’s ability to easily switch your wifi, bluetooth etc. on or off is great because it saves the phone’s resources etc. It’s also a great phone for the geek in me because I can manage it like a pc. I can kill tasks, check how much battery power an app uses etc. not to mention the plethora of apps available.

The iPhone 4 still has one if the best screens available. Nothing, and I mean nothing beats the that phone’s 330 ppi. The pictures look unbelievable good. The gyro sensor is super accurate when tilting to landscape mode for the web browser. The fact that I can arrange my apps into category groups makes it easy to find what I’m looking for. The dedicated mute.ring button on the side is so handy.

We need to change our ways

I read sites like Engadget and Slashgear daily and you don’t have to scroll far down the comments to see that their are always some fanboys present who refuse to acknowledge when their brand isn’t the flavour of the day.

As people who want to design great user experiences we can’t afford to be ignorant. If you do that then you create what’s happening to blackberry’s market share right now. But more than that we are robbing our creativity from any future growth and we will keep making the same mistakes and the same designs over and over.

Remember how I only listened to the hair bands when I was young? Back then I actually bought a Green Day album called Nimrod and I secretly listened to it because I feared the embarrassment my friends would create.

Today I still listen to rock and metal most of the time, but when the radio’s on I listen to it and if the song is catchy, whether it’s rock, pop or punk I enjoy it for what it is.

Update

I recently had the opportunity to play with a friend’s Samsung Galaxy S II – currently their flagship phone. The specs are more or less to something like the iPhone 4S with dual core CPU and 1080p video recording and 8 megapixel camera. I was seriously considering buying the phone due to all the excellent review and feedback.

However once I started playing around I was a bit disappointed since the basic animations for swiping from left to right just wasn’t that smooth. And playing around with the phone I was increasingly dismayed by android itself. If you’ve ever played around with an iPhone 4 or wp7 phone you’ll understand why. Their ability to integrate social networking seamlessly and the general workflow I personally find to be better than android.

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Is the $300 million dollar button still valid?

May 31 2011

I suspect I might get stoned for this post but it intrigued me so much I just had to ask it. And yes the famous button is now old news but I’ve only now come to ask certain questions.

I’m reading chapter 1 of Luke Wroblewski’s famous book “Web Form Design“, and at the end of the chapter he makes his point about the necessity to do user research and proper form design with this piece you can find here.

When I read this, firstly I was shocked beyond belief why the initial design failed. From my perspective hardly any of the e-commerce sites I use actually differ from the “failed” design. And these sites aren’t mickey mouse either – we’re talking about the big players and even some great local ones.

Just to substantiate my point I’ll show some quick examples I found. The process I took on each of these sites was to add any random item to my basket whilst NOT logged in. Then proceed to check out paying specific attention as to whether I could do so immediately or whether an account had to be registered first.

Amazon

Amazon Checkout (Click to enlarge the image)

Amazon very nearly matches the “failed” design in terms of work flow. You either log in with an existing account or you have to create a new one.

Kalahari.net

Kalahari.net Checkout (Click to enlarge the image)

Again Kalahari.net has a very similar approach to Amazon’s.

Zune Music Store

Zune Checkout (Click to enlarge the image)

Well first off the Checkout screen is different from the rest. Sadly it’s bad. You have no real idea what’s going to happen next once you click on ‘Accept’ and they already bombard you with the option for a newsletter. In the end you also have to sign in or create an account like with Amazon and Kalahari.net.

Android App Market

Android Checkout (Click to enlarge the image)

You are given the option of signing in but there’s no button to register? If you click on the ‘Sign In’ button it takes you to the 2nd screenshot above where you can sign in or register. How do new users know that clicking the ‘Sign In’ button will take them to a screen where they can create a new account ?

Ebay

Ebay Checkout (Click to enlarge the image)

Finally I hit the jackpot. Ebay support signing in to an existing account, registering a new one or using a ‘Guest Checkout’. I’ll bet money that although the business that employed the $300 million button solution isn’t mentioned in Luke’s book, it could be Ebay.

Thoughts

Why aren’t any of the other sites using this kind of one-time checkout if it raked in so much money? Does it have anything to do with the current knowledge of the average web user in e-commerce?

Pretty much any site nowadays works on the principle of signing in or create a new account, in order to make a purchase. People’s web literacy and skills change over time so something that worked 3 years ago might not necessarily have the same relevance today.

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Some thoughts around WP7

May 08 2011

It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to write another entry due to a hectic schedule, but hopefully I can do so more often.

Something that’s really caught my attention, especially since it’s latest update, is Windows Phone 7 (wp7) – and there are a couple of nice features that distinguish it from its rivals. (NOTE: I’m a developer using Microsoft technologies so I’m biased)

I’m sure most tech savvy people have seen some or other wp7 images but just in case you haven’t here’s a typical one.

The WP7 home screen (Click to enlarge the image)

Just for the record I don’t actually own a wp7 phone – in fact I still roll with a nokia E71 (sort of like toyota corolla - few features but very reliable).

So what’s perhaps the most apparent at first look is that the general look and feel of the OS is almost flat or 2D like which is definitely different from the other major vendors like iOS and Android. From what I gather the look and feel is referred to as ‘Metro’.

Where the other 2 vendors have a 3D appearance and icons the wp7 UI have what’s referred to as ‘Live Tiles’ – the green rectangular shapes shown in the image. What’s cool and useful about these are that their content is dynamic and updates itself. For instance when you have voice mail, the ‘phone’ tile shows the amount of voice mails. Or the ‘message’ tile shows the amount of sms messages unread and the same for outlook integration in terms of emails.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You know how you get the typical flight booking? Well I saw one from Qantas for wp7 and there’s a dedicated tile for the app. The app uses the phone’s GPS to get your current location and correlates that with the airport and your flight time. Based on that it knows more or less how much time is needed to get to the airport in time. As soon as the app detects that you might be late it updates the tile color to red and indicates with some text that you need to get your backside to the airport – pronto! So that’s another way that the Live Tiles are used intelligently to give you up to date information.

Something that I especially like about the UI is it’s fairly simple presentation and the amount of information. I’ve seen some people ~~abusing~~customizing their Androids to the point where my eyes pop out at the amount of information they can cram onto one home screen. Remember Fitt’s law? The one about predicting the time required to move to a target based on the input’s current location and size of the target. It’s probably debatable whether it’ s really relevant in this situation but I think it applies. I’ve seen some mobile websites that use breadcrumbs with a font size of 6 points and then expect the user to actually use it efficiently. The tiles are fairly large and they cater for for the most important information.

Finally the amount of tiles is also good use of something like Hick’s law – “the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has” (wikipedia).

There’s so much more I’d love to say but sleep’s calling