March 2010 Issue
Designing Mobile Search: Turning Limitations into Opportunities
Published: March 8, 2010
Thinking of porting your Web finding experience to iPhone, Android, or Windows Mobile? Just forget about the fact that these devices are basically full-featured computers with tiny screens. Having gone through this design exercise a few times, I have realized that designing a great mobile finding experience requires a way of thinking that is quite different from our typical approach to designing search for Web or desktop applications. To put it simply, designing a mobile finding experience requires thinking in terms of turning limitations into opportunities. In this column, I’ll discuss some of the limitations of mobile platforms, as well as the opportunities they afford, and share a few design ideas that might come in handy for your own projects.
Understanding Mobile Platforms
One of the challenges of mobile application design is understanding both the
capabilities and limitations of each platform. Let’s use the
iPhone finding experience as an example. On the plus side, the iPhone has
a high-resolution screen, Multi-Touch controls, accelerometer, persistent
data storage, cool video transitions, push content delivery, GPS, and a device
ID. The benefits of these features have been pretty much beaten to death
in advertisements, so I will not discuss them here. On the other hand,
the problem constraints and limitations of mobile devices are much more interesting. I have found few sources that discuss these in detail, so in this column,
I’ll attempt to describe the most important challenges of designing for the new generation of smartphones—at least as they pertain to finding.
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Do’s and Don’ts of Usability Testing
Published: March 8, 2010
Usability testing is one of the least glamorous, but most important aspects of user experience research. Over the years, it has also been one of the forms of user research we have performed most frequently. In doing so, we’ve learned quite a few best practices and encountered some potential pitfalls. We think it’s important that we share what we’ve learned with the many stakeholders, designers, and engineers who might find this information helpful.
DO: Get involved and observe usability test sessions.
Both designers and stakeholders can get a lot out observing usability test
sessions. Witnessing participants’ reactions to a product and its user
interface can help you understand product and usability issues that might be
extremely difficult for researchers to communicate through reports, meetings,
or presentations. If you have the opportunity to observe a few test sessions,
you should definitely take advantage of it.
Read more
Playing Well with Others: Design Principles for Social Augmented Experiences
Published: March 8, 2010
As the recent launches of Google Goggles (see Figure 1), Bing Maps (see Figure 2), Junaio, and the Unifeye SDK have demonstrated, technical barriers to delivering augmented reality (AR) experiences on a broad scale are falling rapidly. Separate advances in technologies for practical and commercial-scale, cloud-based speech and language processing; real-time search; computer vision; accurate geolocation and device awareness; AR commerce and development platforms; as well as high-bandwidth, sensor-enhanced mobile devices are coming together to form a first-generation infrastructure for augmented reality.
With the exotic, mixed realities that futurists and science-fiction
writers have envisioned seemingly just around the corner, it is time to move
beyond questions of technical feasibility to consider the value and impact
of turning the realities of everyday social settings and experiences inside
out. As with all new technologies as they move from the stage of technical
probe to social probe, this AR transformation will happen case by case and
context by context, involving many factors beyond the direct reach of UX
design. However, as a result of the inherently social nature of augmented
reality, we can be sure the value and impact of many augmented experiences
depends in large part on how effectively they integrate the social dimensions
of real-world settings, in real time.
Read more
User Friendly 2009: Design in Asia
Published: March 8, 2010
In November 2009, the UX community of China gathered in Shanghai for User Friendly 2009, the sixth User Friendly event. The theme for this conference was “Design in Asia,” a hot topic as China looks to shift thinking from “made in China” to “created in China.”
We were very lucky to have such a quality group of both local and international speakers, including our invited keynotes:
- Jared Spool of UIE—who spoke about “The Dawning of the Age of Experience”
- Bill Moggridge of IDEO—whose topic was “What’s Next for Design in Asia?”
- Marc Rettig of Fit and Associates—who presented “Design for Life”
The keynotes were complimented nicely by speeches from UPA President Silvia Zimmerman and UPA China President Jason Huang.
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Topic: Conference Reviews
Rapid Desirability Testing: A Case Study
Published: February 22, 2010
In the design process we follow at my company, Mad*Pow Media Solutions, once we have defined the conceptual direction and content strategy for a given design and refined our design approach through user research and iterative usability testing, we start applying visual design. Generally, we take a key screen whose structure and functionality we have finalized—for example, a layout for a home page or a dashboard page—and explore three alternatives for visual style. These three alternative visual designs, or comps, include the same content, but reflect different choices for color palette and imagery.
The idea is to present business
owners and stakeholders with different visual design options from which
they can choose. Sometimes there is a clear favorite among stakeholders
or an option that makes the most sense from a brand perspective. However,
there can often be disagreements among the members of a project team
on which design direction we should choose. If we’ve
done our job right, there are rationales for our various design decisions
in the different comps, but even so, there may be disagreement about
which rationale is most appropriate for the situation.
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Topic: Columns | User Research
Laban Movement Analysis for User Experience Design
Published: February 22, 2010
I am a klutz. I fully admit this fact. So, whenever I’m in a show that requires me to learn any kind of choreography, whether dancing, fighting, or intricate movement details, I start to feel butterflies flutter in my stomach. My own nervousness has been known to get in the way and cause me to stumble. I would probably be fine if I could just learn to relax and go with the flow. But the language of choreography and movement is confusing to me. I just don’t get what I should do. Even as a kid, I always hated that silly game Hokey-Pokey. Case in point: I was in the middle of a reasonably simple dance in a show. We were performing outside, on the grass, and I was so worried about ruts or rocks in the ground that I wasn’t paying attention to everything else. One of my shoes went flying off! Horribly embarrassing! Though I’m sure only the people in the front of the audience even noticed. Did I mention I’m a klutz?
As a User Experience Designer, there have been moments on projects
when I’ve had similar feelings of ineptitude—usually when
I’ve been
faced with a large, complex system or some completely new and foreign
domain I didn’t
understand. Have you ever experienced an awkward moment as you’ve tried to figuratively dance and negotiate your way through an uncomfortable
situation? This often brings fear of making a decision or taking
a step forward along with it—maybe even some shoe-flying moments. A recent acting class, in which I learned what Laban Movement Analysis is all
about, helped me find a way to get past this fear. When people say knowledge is power, they are most assuredly correct.
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Topic: Columns | Design Process
Enterprise User Experience: Building a UX Group | Hosting a Get-to-Know-UX Event
Published: February 22, 2010
In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss two enterprise UX topics:
Every month, Ask UXmatters answers questions our
readers have about user experience matters. You can read our experts’ responses
to your question in an upcoming edition of Ask
UXmatters! Just send your question to us at: ask.uxmatters@uxmatters.com.
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Topic: Columns | UX Management | UX Strategy
Review of Information Architecture Evaluation Tools: Chalkmark and Treejack
Published: February 22, 2010
Recently, Optimal Workshop, the creators of the online, card-sorting tool Optimal Sort, released two new information architecture evaluation tools: Chalkmark and Treejack. Though these tools are not perfect, they do provide the ability to quickly and easily test early designs and information hierarchies with large numbers of participants.
As a UX consultancy, Optimal Workshop has been very open to receiving user feedback and has incorporated that feedback in updates to their software. I offer this review in the spirit of providing constructive feedback that I hope will benefit the products. I’m sure these tools will continue to improve over time.
Testing Findability with Chalkmark
An online, unmoderated testing tool, Chalkmark lets you test findability
in a Web application design. Chalkmark gives participants a task such as Find special offers on cruises and presents a screenshot, as shown in Figure 1. Participants click links in the screenshot where they think they would
find the information they need. Then, Chalkmark presents the next task
and the next screen. The test results are heatmaps, showing where participants clicked during each task. The heatmaps show concentrations of clicks
and how many participants clicked each area of a screen.
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Topic: Information Architecture | Product Reviews | Usability
