Re: UKNM: Re: Amazon.com

[Stefan Magdalinski]

Stewart Dean wrote:


 >  >

 >  > only one thing works really well: spending a very large amount of time

 >  > surfing other sites, and looking out carefully for when *you* make

 >  > mistakes browsing sites. Was it your mistake, or was the site

 >  > misleading? why was it confusing? why did it take you so long to find

 >  > that piece of information? Did that site do something very intuitively

 >  > and cleverly? then steal it.

 > 

 > Wrong wrong wrong.  The thing about good usability design is it's invisible.

 > Looking at the end results you'll only see the overtly visible parts and

 > miss what actually make the site work.


again, you misunderstand. I was talking about surfing from the point of

view of a professional who is sensitive to the underlying patterns and

techniques being employed.


or in fact I misunderstand, because I can't see anything in your para

that contradicts mine. 

 > 

 > When people don't enjoy a site they'll often blame everything else apart

 > from what may be the true reason - it may be bad information architecture or

 > bad interface design.


A very senior person at BBC News said to me that 'the removal of

underlined links from their site wasn't an issue, because not many

people had complained about it.' to which I pointed out that most users

wouldn't even be aware, but you're still making it harder for them.  


 >  > and as well as that, being very aware that

 >  >

 >  > a) sophistication of features is usually inversely

 >  > proportional to ease

 >  > of use.  strike a balance, and then strike out 3 more features.

 > 

 > Features?  A given site must perform certain tasks - this is all part of the

 > design process. If you're adding random features with no rhyme or reason -

 > like adding a chat room because you can and you want to build up a


I'm not talking about adding features with 'no rhyme or reason', and

I've never built a site like you describe (although I've often resisted

others temptations to)


but if you think that what tasks a site should perform is always a

no-brainer decision, then you should try building something other than

toys. 


An example from my recent past: There was a lot of debate when we built

the virgin mobile site, about whether to support buying multiple

different types of phones in the same order. We'd already decided to

avoid shopping cart nonsense because we could build a far simpler buying

process for our range of 7 phones without it. It meant building a

complex process to support tying up handsets with sims, services, and

provisioning, and cost us a lot of development time, but it worked

fairly nicely within the UI. A week after launch, we pulled the feature,

because the only person who had used it was one of our testers, thus

making the site even simpler. 



 > 'community'. The importance is to understand the function of any given

 > application and as far as I'm concerned the only way to do that is proactive

 > user testing.

 > 

 >  > b) (too obvious, but still neglected)

 >  >

 >  > every customer is less experienced than you are. make it simpler.

 >  > always.

 > 

 > That rules interfaces that demand regular use. By adding wizards to word to


the sites I build do. 


 > make things easy for novice users Microsoft in some ways have made the

 > program harder to use. There is a concept I call skill based interfaces that

 > allow rapid use but require a certain learning curve. Not all systems should

 > be designed for dummies. Take a guitar for example - it's easy to pick up

 > but hard to master but the results are a true real time system.

 > 

 > It's not about experience but cultural background - the users may be

 > infinitely more experienced than you if you, say, are designing a medical

 > site for medical professionals but do not have a medical background.


all: cf. command lines. 


 > 

 > There has been a lot of excellent work done in usability and a lot of

 > lessons learnt. The problem is the whole subject is not easy to lump into a


 > traditional category. Elements of CE can be found in traditional media and

 > it's best not to ignore the lessons learnt in film, print and, my favourite,

 > game design.


John Carmack designed the first usuable 3d navigation system for

keyboard and mouse. 


 > 

 > Above all creating good interactivity is *not* common sense and requires a

 > lot of knowledge and experience as with any field. Being a good marketing

 > person, graphic designer, film maker or exceptional Java programmer won't

 > make you a good customer/user experience person - but it may help.


all agreed.


stefan


-- 

/** Stefan Magdalinski, computin  

     info: http://www.isness.org/house/boat/sig.txt **/ 



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