Project Oriel » ux

Justifying a Good UI

Peter Edstrom — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 03:31:45 +0000

It is an old analysis, but still a good one, The Cost of Frustration:

“While it’s hard to measure whether a design is poor or not, we can easily measure when frustration occurs. With a little digging, we can usually associate a dollar cost to the frustration, thereby giving us a way to estimate, in financial terms, the cost of the poor design.”

New Glasses

Peter Edstrom — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:00:28 +0000

A while back I was listening to Jared Spool from User Interface Engineering talk about Amazon.com’s successes. He has an entertaining way of presenting, and I enjoyed the UIE findings in the Amazon.com review for Tuscan Whole Mile, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz. If you haven’t read the reviews for this milk, I highly recommend it. They are very entertaining and you won’t be disappointed.

We recently replaced our kitchen glasses (11 years old, missing half the set) with new Duralex Picardie Clear Tumblers. One of the reviews, specifically the one below, reminded Sarah and I of the Tuscan Whole Milk reviews and ultimately sold us on the product. After a week’s worth of use we have not been disappointed and we may just be Duralex fans for life. Prior to this glassware search, we had never heard of Duralex before.

These are the New Glasses of the House:

The Web is not a File Cabinate

Peter Edstrom — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:11:09 +0000

Jared Spool interviews Ginny Redish in the SpoolCast: The Web as a Conversation. She says:

“The file cabinate is the wrong metaphors for your web site. The right one is a a telephone, because it is all about having a conversation.”

This really changes how you approach generating content for a site when you think of it this way, and is one I wish more big companies embraced. She has some rather remarkable credentials too, so you might want to listen. According to her site: ”In 1985, Ginny set up one of the first independent usability test laboratories in North America where she and her colleagues had users come to try out interfaces and documentation for clients including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SAP, and Sony.”

Nice.

Create a Vision and Reward Failures #agile2009

Peter Edstrom — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:23:13 +0000

Jared Spool, a Researcher for User Interface Engineering, gave the closing keynote to the Agile 2009 conference. He had an informative and entertaining talk about what UIE has found with their research.

He used this video from Apple on the “Apple Computer Knowledge Navigator” as an example of a good experience vision and discussed how it directs the actions of the company. Here is a short write-up from Forrester on the talk. Of about 200 different company attributes, the UIE research found that the following three were the most useful in predicting long term success:

VISION – Can everyone on your team describe the experience of using your design 5 years from now?

FEEDBACK – In the last six weeks, have you spent more than 2 hours watching someone use your or a competitors design?

CULTURE – In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?

The first two are (I think) rather self explanatory, however the 3rd has gotten double-takes for everyone I’ve discussed with. The theory is really pretty straight forward: discovering a major design failure is to be celebrated because it is informative. If the culture of an organization celebrates learning, then you will find learning occurs both with successes and with failures. Wonderful point of view.