This coming Monday: 10/24/11 from 6-7:30PM Luke Wrolewski will be giving a a talk on The Impact of Social Models.  Sign up for the event here: The Impact of Social Models

When: 24 Oct 2011 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM

Location: The Microsoft Building | 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Chevy Chase, MD

Spaces left: 11

Join us afterwards to talk about local UX opportunities and learn more about what Limina is up to!  (Drinks on us!)

Between 2009 and 2010, Limina worked with a brilliant group of scientists and software engineers at Molecular Devices on their next generation digital microscopy software.  After a thorough review of their existing product, and some contextual reviews of the software in use, Limina conducted the following:

• Cognitive Walk-through
• Expert UI Evaluation (Analysis and Recommendations)
• Alternative Interaction Models
• Workflows, Storyboards and Wireframes
• Usability Testing
• UI Designs and Custom Iconography.

You can see some examples of our work here, but the video, with our client emphasizing the value of enhanced User Experience is the real success story.

-Jon

(Reblog)

IDEO released a five-minute video exploring the future of digital books. Their illustrated concepts highlight some interesting opportunity areas in the publishing industry through three distinct reading experiences:

Nelson reinforces books as critical thinking tools, providing multiple perspectives, references, and current conversations on a single subject. The layers of information beyond the book itself provide greater context and encourages a deeper dive into the book throughout history and into the future.

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Coupland addresses the challenge to stay on top of the thinking and writing in our world and professional field that so many of us feel. Readers can easily keep up with “must-reads” by following what colleagues are reading and interact with them through “book clubs” and other social layers (discussions, suggestions, lists, purchases) to help each other share and learn.

Alice explores new ways for users to interact and affect written narratives by introducing non-linear and game mechanics to reading. By introducing the reader’s active participation, this concept “blurs the lines between reality and fiction.” Certain interactions allow the reader to transcend traditional media by utilizing geographic location, communication with characters, and user contribution to storyline and plot.

A very cool blue sky project from IDEO to say the least. I enjoyed the way they chose to compartmentalize the functionality rather than attempting to redefine the book in a single all-inclusive interface (a failure we see in most of these concept projects). This project, and examples appearing all over the industry, only further prove that the future of books in the digital age does not lie in single solution but rather a utilization of technology to better address the wants and needs of users to share, interact, and learn more through specialized design solutions. We are certainly on the precipice of a whole new world for this morphed understanding of the “book.”If you are interested in hearing more about IDEO’s project, check out the interview with two of the project’s designers, Duane Bray and Robert Lenne, on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show. There’s also a conversation about the topic going on over at IDEO’s Facebook page.

Video and photos from IDEO.

This post was originally posted by Willem Van Lancker, 21 Sep 2010

• 20 Websites to Help You Master User Interface Design
• 10 Tools for Evaluating Web Design Accessibility
• 11 Inspiring Lessons from Web Design Experts
• Best Practices for Hints and Validation in Web Forms

Hope you find these helpful,

-Jon Fukuda

We believe that product usability is the responsibility of all departments and functions involved in the development process: Marketing, Sales, Software Development, QA, Help Desk and more.

In an ideal product and end user oriented organization, usability should be a core principle throughout all phases of the development cycle. This is a quick post to provide an overview of where various usability milestones should be injected into the definition,  design, development and deployment of a given product or website.

Definition
In this early stage where requirements are being gathered,  product management & marketing should take some time to better understand the target users, their environment and the subtleties of the interface requirements.

What are the gross categories of the target audience?  This doesn’t necessarily fall simply into categories of user-role or demographic.  More often than not, behavioral and environmental trends are what drive perceptions of whether something is usable, or useful.  For example, people who work on their feet and are not necessarily at their desk for the full 8hrs of a given work day, will need larger visual cues for critical alerts or timely calls to action.  This is typically the type of thing you will only catch if you conduct contextual interviews and user ethnography.

Design
During the design phase, it’s helpful to have your target audience and user types documented as personas.  The persona documentation is a helpful reference tool for business and functional analysts charged with translating processes flows and functional requirements into system work-flow models and interface schematics.

More often than not, the phrase “That looks alright to me” is uttered among product managers and analysts without having a touchstone to vet the flows and schematics.  Knowledge of the user personas, task models and use cases will always drive the design to a more solid state.

Even the best straw man work-flows and schematics can use some vetting – before moving into your development sprints, have the marketing and product team test out the design on paper with some sample users.  Initial feedback on the mock-ups typically reveal insightful recommendations.  Questions like “What would you expect to happen when you click here?”  or “Why did you decide that’s what you needed to click?” will help you understand how they are perceiving the design and the information as you designed it.

Development
For whatever reason, UI designs often undergo a round of changes between leaving the hands of the UI designers and the final build.  This is typical and usually can be attributed to technical, time or budgetary constraints.

Every now and then, changes are snuck in by engineers who have a feel for UI and have their own approach to design.   For this reason, it’s helpful to document all of the flows and schematics, along with interactive states for all UI components.  The documentation should be supplemented with the design rationale in order to maintain the integrity of the UI.  This is particularly important for actionable design elements.  If you don’t have a rationale for the design, you may want to rethink how it got into the schematic.  As an added benefit, this helps to reducing developer’s time spent on interpreting designs and to remain focused on clean code.

Validation
Once development is complete and the product enters alpha/beta testing, A formal round of Usability Tests are essential and effective methods for benchmark data, validation of your designs and gauging readiness for market. Key concerns should be identified and addressed prior to release, or where appropriate they may be deferred and addressed during future product releases.

By keeping a fixed eye on the users and their interactions with the product, your organization will strengthen the vital bridge between usability issues and the software development view of the user interface.

Post Product Launch
Even after the product is released to market users will go through adoption and long-tail stages of use.  Several rounds of usability testing will help gain the quantitative and qualitative user interaction feedback essential for success.

In gathering feedback from users and preparing for successful future product revisions and enhancements, your organization will ensure that the product has every opportunity to achieve the results required by your end users’ investment and trust.

-Jon Fukuda

The set up

In October 2007, GE Energy signed a memorandum to deploy advanced energy delivery and metering technologies that will give residential and industrial consumers greater control over their energy usage and costs.  November 2007, Google announces investment in energy technologies marking the tipping point of a new era on our energy experience.  Just this month, Google revealed the iceberg tip of their Smart Meter consumer solution, harnessing the power of their analytic tool set, Google has settled in the keystone position of the smart meter user experience.

Earlier this month, Limina had the privilege to compete against leading technology consulting firms for a contract to research, design, deploy and test a consumer facing portal that would empower consumers to make the smart consumption decisions and, in the future, play a key role in consumption based home automation.

Much of how this future scenario is already in the works as demonstrated by LucidDesignGroup’s Building Dashboard product for schools, companies and homes.  With this dashboard you will, not only monitor and your building’s usage, but chart it against your usage history and, if you have on-site renewable power generation such as wind and solar, you can make smart decisions on when to sell back to the grid to maximize your return.

This display panel was featured in a Michelle Kaughman home on an Episode of NextWorld on the Science Channel, where she discussed live scenarios for home and energy automation with the dashboard as the centerpiece.

The Challenge:

1) Getting the energy providers, homes and consumers ready: In October 2008 the Government in the UK announced a mandate to have every household outfitted with gas and electricity smart meters by the year 2020.  On March 19 2009, www.whitehouse.gov posted the recovery act with an $11billion dollar investment in a smart-grid.  While there are no mandates, one can predict action is imminent.

2) Ubiquity: Google is about as ubiquitous of a technology service provider as you can get, their interest and investment in this space is a key indicator that this challenge will be met.  LucidDesignGroup’s Dashboard has thought forward to live case for interfacing with consumers in an easy to use way making the information and more importantly calls to action accessible and elegant.

Limina is always looking forward to turnkey technological and experience innovations in any industry, but has a special interest in contributing to the global efforts to reduce energy waste and build awareness in renewable resources.

-Jon Fukuda

Submit your RFP’s to services at limina-ao dot com

At Limina we spend a lot of time working on complex information display where users are making critical decisions based off of key content, often displayed in tables.  Therefore, it is very important that the formatting of tables be as consistent and clear as possible. Tables should clarify and enhance the information they present, not obscure it.

I like to think that most of us involved in GUI design (be it on the interface design or development end) have either read Tufte’s books or heard about his useful guidelines for laying out and designing tabular data. Yet, one of the most common issues we run into when performing Expert UI Evaluations is poor table design.

Googling around the web I found few sites discussing the topic of table design other than those providing libraries of CSS table designs; however in many cases these reference libraries actually add to the proliferation of bad table design. Developers get excited when they figure out a way to code up a new table style or interaction method and post it for others to use. But there is little discussion on where and when (if ever) these solutions are appropriate. Remember, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Here are the three areas where we commonly see the most UI design and usability mistakes and some guidelines that should help you create more useful and usable tables:

Design Style:

Help users focus on what they can learn from table data; the data should stand out, not the design of the table.

Minimize visual clutter and avoid over styling

• Do you really need horizontal and vertical grid lines and an alternating row color?
• I can’t think of any good reason to ever use a patterned background

Avoid over use of color

• A basic table shell does not need more than 2 or 3 colors to differentiate column headers, a content/grid and a selection highlight
• When you use colors use them consistently. Users need to know they can count on the visual cues you provide them so they can act efficiently
• When using an alternating line color keep the contrast to a minimum and use soft colors that are easy on the eye
• Don’t make the alternating line color too similar to your line item selection color

Content alignment (left, right, center)

• Know your content alignment rules. Typically content is aligned left. But numerical content can only be revealing if the column is appropriately aligned and left alignment is not usually the best choice.


SOURCE: http://blog.editage.com/?q=Aligning-Columns

Use cell padding and spacing – cramped table cells are much harder to read, make sure you provide enough space to allow users to easily scan content

Interaction style:

Unless explicitly called out, a user will typically need to spend time “discovering” interaction features.  In the case of tables, there are a number of visual cues you can provide to direct their interactions.

• Define a set of table styles that lets users know how they can interact with table content; read-only, editable, selectable, etc
• Apply the styles consistently
• Consider revealing controls on-hover to decrease visual clutter for scanning, but enable the table for interaction when necessary
• When designing complex tables that have mixed content types (e.g. read only and editable and/or selectable) provide a visual style that illustrates these key differences
• Clearly indicate which columns are sortable and which is the default
• Indicate whether users can resize columns and rows
• Consider using mouse over text to display lengthy cell data when truncating
• Avoid using fixed tables inside panes or windows that horizontally resize. The reason for this is because it will be easy for users to accidentally lose some columns by resizing a table-containing pane to be horizontally smaller

Table usage:

Is a table the best format for displaying your content? Sometimes viewing data in a tabular format doesn’t help your users see trends in the data. Ask yourself if the information would be better displayed using a simple (or sometimes complex) visualization. Or, consider providing both a tabular and visualization view of the content.

This list of considerations is not meant to be the definitive guide for good table design but it should help you avoid the most obvious pitfalls and put you on the right track.

-Maria

If you’ve gone shopping for orange juice anytime in 2009, you’ve been privy to one of the biggest branding blunders since New Coke. Pepsico released it’s new Tropicana brand to the market in January 2009 and shortly after, the public unleashed a firestorm of criticism over the new design.  On February 23rd, just under 2 months later, Pepsi announced they will be reverting back to the original branding.

While, for Pepsi, this has been an unfortunate loss of marketing spend and brand equity, there are some excellent lessons to take away from the experiment.

Lesson 1) Know thy consumer

At Limina we often tout the benefits of conducting user research and usability tests before, during and after the design phase of any project.  As we now know, this applies not only to pure user interfaces and product design, but to something as seemingly minor as a branding exercise.  Focus groups, as opposed to usability studies tend to remove the product and the user from context of use, and has the tendency to lose out on the rich data collection opportunities users will encounter in a live scenario.  Had the brand design team tested the new packaging in a grocery store and observed product selection behavior  of consumers with the new brand against a control study (of the original brand), they would have learned an incredible amount of qualitative and quantitative data about the impact of the new design.

My own personal observations and experience with the new design at the point of purchase consisted of stalled out consumers standing in front of the tropicana selections, heads tilted slightly  trying to figure out which one they used to buy.  On my first encounter with the new brand, I must have  spent 3 minutes crouched in front of the juice rack looking over the new and drastically reduced information based labeling of:  Some Pulp, No Pulp, Lots of Pulp, etc. etc. before grabbing the carton of choice.  Surely a brand manager would have noted this as indication of “missing the mark” and hit the drawing board for another pass before going into full blown package manufacturing.

Take Away: Test early, test often.  Context Matters

Lesson 2) Detailed  Design vs. Gestalt

The Gestalt notion,  “The whole is other than the sum of it’s parts”, could not have rung more truth in this event.
It’s one thing to look at the design of the new Tropicana carton as it sits on the table and admire some of the aesthetic choices of typography, pantones and graphics.

It’s truly another thing to put all of the variations of over a dozen cartons on the table and ask you to make a decision based on the design.  If you say you identified your preferred  household carton of choice without having to scan the selection more than once…  you’re either lying or you worked on the the brand strategy for this campaign.
Either way, running the same visual scan with the original branding is a far simpler task.  Here’s why:  The original branding had large color blocks as part of their information design system to color code a family of very similar products.  On the original design, the color coding  takes up nearly 1/4 of the visual field.  So, whether you’re a pulp, no pulp, some pulp consumer…  you knew which one was made just for you.  Looking at the new designs, the color coding system fails as it’s reduced to less than 10% of the visual field and while they added some redundant labels in case you missed the color coding, colored text on colored juice graphics don’t quite pop the way white text on color does.

Take Away: Avoid designing in a vacuum, think of how a single change ripples through the whole.

Lesson 3) Usability is for everyone

Most people who know me, but are unfamiliar with the usability field, often begin to glaze over when I start to break down what Limina does.  So I love a great anecdote that’s accessible enough for me to put people in the shoes of a frustrated user and get bobble-head nods back.  The Tropicana story is great because it’s not that they should have never touched the brand…  it’s more that they lacked an understanding of how to modify the brand without negatively impacting the information design system which worked so well.

I’ve even heard our clients say “we have a designer for that we only need you for the usability piece” or “we’d like you to run a usability study and give us the results, we can take it from there.”  It’s really not enough to see the poor ratings on a score card run with it or to take a wireframe and go nuts on the visual design.  It’s critical to see usability and information design as a holistic end-to-end process, any loss in translation of user requirements not only results in sunk cost on design/development/manufacturing, but potentially failure to take flight.  Tropicana is fortunate enough to have enough capital to absorb the blow and correct their course.

Take Away: If you’re not sure if usability applies to your product or software…  ask someone who knows something about it.

Lesson 4) Leveraging social tools

It’s no secret…  social networking tools are extremely effective in marketing feedback.  Great product managers have had their ears to the ground in social network response mechanisms for some time.  Good examples of consumer feedback mechanisms are Dell’s ideastorm.com and Starbucks’ mystarbucksidea.com, but more recently we’re seeing the strength of  Twitter and Facbook as focus group and user feedback mechanisms.  While you’re not going to get fine granularity of complex usability issues resolved in these forums, you can definitely gain perspective on broad stroke issues that ail your product.

Take Away: Word of Mouth marketing is a two way street, sure, you can promote yourself all over the social web, but take time to listen to what they’re saying in response.

Lesson 5) If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

Needs no explanation.  Taking a page from Sony/Aiwa, Nissan/Infinity, Toyota/Lexux/Scion – if you want to test something new, create a test market or spin off a sub-brand.

I’ve heard rumors that this was a stunt to get consumer buzz.  I’m not sure I’m buying that, afterall..  they didn’t change their juice formula,  just the box design.  Whatever the case, this has been a great example of how not to mess with a good thing.

-Jon