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

Being a virtual company has it’s challenges – communicating, planning, collaborating, tracking, managing and delivering have many potential pitfalls.  We wanted to take a moment to highlight some products that have been helping us to drive more efficiency in our virtual structure.

In recent months, Limina has been picking up the pace in collaborating with UX personnel in the field and delivering our services.  This has been, in no small part, due to our use of collab-ware.  We’ve recently migrated our intranet, client extranets and project collaboration space to OneHub workspaces.   For the past 5 years, we’ve been  using GoToMeeting to facilitate our internal project checkpoints, along with a host of user research activities and client presentations.  And we’ve recently started using ClickTime as our user friendly time reporting product.

Other enablers we’re tinkering with in our lab include: Pidoco, iRise,and iMockups, to name a few. Add into the mix Skype, GoogleDocs, chat and mail clients and you’re well on your way!

We just thought we’d give a shout out to technology products that’ve been making deploying our user centered research and design services  not only more efficient for a decentralized UX practice, but fun and easy!  Our clients and field agents love how we’ve brought these products into our process and service delivery suite.  And we couldn’t think of any better way to say: “We <3 These Great Products!”

-Jon

• 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

Limina is often faced with products that have been in the market for years with little to no professional user centered and UI design methodology applied. It’s typically apparent in the interface before delving into the history of development through issues including but, not limited to the following examples:

• inconsistent UI patterning
• obtuse, or in many cases, non-existent workflows where users are either left to their own devices to develop their own approach to the system or spend time in manuals or training
• random color and graphic treatments with little or no usage rationale
• core features and functions hidden in right click menus with no alternative access
• extensive use of dialogs and workspace changes to complete primary tasks
• random and inconsistent screen layout
• chop-shop iconography, cut and pasted from other applications

Most of these issues can be attributed to an engineering driven culture where usability has not been a core part of the methodology. Sure, the code is clean, the feature works, QA and Unit Tests have passed with flying colors… but is it usable or useful from an end to end experience?

A typical engineering approach to incorporating customer feedback
As a stop-gap to implementing user centered design practices, we’ve heard: “We’re meeting with our customers regularly to hear what they need and we keep them happy by feeding these requirements directly to the engineers to implement.”

First of all, we applaud you for going directly to the users with your product and taking back their requests into the design… but this is a slippery slope.

Although you may know your users and even have some working for you, how well are you capturing their needs? Are you asking the right questions? Are your users able to articulate what they need? You may have voluminous user feedback, support call logs, or error log reports on file, but have you put the user data into a framework that generates an actionable set of UI enhancements?

Equally important; when you have captured their feedback, how do you use it? Without a clear definition or roadmap for incorporating the user feedback, your product is at risk of losing competitive ground. When a company has to spend additional revenue in extensive training sessions, help documentation, call centers and product revisions, the margin of return on investment can take a massive beating.

Here are some activities to help you to incorporate user feedback into your agile development practice:

1) Give the feedback some context – What were users doing or attempting to do when they encountered the issue, and what are their roles? Usability specialists conduct a set of contextual inquiries to interview and observe users as they are performing various tasks in the context of their workplace to determine both system and non-system based activities, documents, and tools that are used to complete their tasks.

2) Quantify and qualify the user data – Where do you see common issues reaching a critical mass? Which are the exceptions and how do you prioritize them? What issues constitute a completely new set of features and possibly a new product?

3) Organize it – Once you have synthesized and prioritized the issues, determine their relationship not only to the system, but also to each other. Which comments are related and which ones are specific to a given task or feature?

The result is a set of researched usability issues that can be organized into enhancements prioritized by issue, prevalence, technical complexity, business, and user benefit.

Such a framework should be employed when embarking on a product definition or enhancement process. It allows parties from marketing, product management, and engineering to uncover the root of software design issues that challenge usability, and ultimately to gain a deeper understanding of their users. Product managers and engineers who gather and process user feedback assist their company by developing the right products and tools for their customers.

This post includes an excerpt from Limina’s white paper “Nine Ways to Improve Software Usability and Increase Market Share“.

Skipping this step leads to an iterative path of organically distorting the original design of the system and frankin-hacking patches and appendages to the product to the point where rebuilding from scratch is easier than overhauling the UI when your users start running to your competitors.

There are a great many development teams using agile methods, SCRUMing it out, getting the features out the door to see what sticks. In many ways, this is a helpful model to beat the first-to-market and innovation clocks, but if the net result is revisiting the feature again and again or playing “pass the trouble ticket” from developer to developer as the feature enhancement is punted to the next iterations for months… something isn’t working.

We are all for engineering driven product teams. In most cases, massive leaps in technical innovation are paved by developer teams and individuals unhindered by business and user requirements. But we’re talking about products in the market that have ROI, user adoption, marketability, competitiveness and other business considerations to name a few.

There’s something to be said for dealing with the cost up-front; for taking the time to build a sustainable product whether in its initial incarnation or when producing the next generation of its kind, because the hidden cost of maintenance, marketing and training can work against you in the long run.

Give us your thoughts and share your experiences with us and our readers!

There have been some recent crowd-sourcing business models making their way on the Usability Research and User Experience Design scene.  The crowd source value proposition is, “High Volume Results – Cheap” – with some important variables like: Quality, Usefulness, Relevance, Focus, Strategy, and more.

How do you make the right decision on whether or not to crowd-source UX research for your project/product and where will you get the most yield for your time, money and energy?  Here’s a quick review of Feedback Army and Loop 11 as well as some tips for your back pocket.

FeedbackArmy

What is it?

We first heard of Feedback Army back in January ’09.  This site is almost exactly what you think it might be.

1. You post up a URL and a list of questions/criteria to evaluate against (3-6 recommended)
2. You select the number of responders to your posting (3 tiers – 10 users for $10, 25 users for $23 and 50 users for $40)
3. Make a payment, wait and watch the reviews roll in.

What do you get?

Just what the site claims you get: “Simple, Cheap ‘Usability Testing’ for your Website.”

Depending on your questions and the range of responses you select, you have some variable control on the quality of the responses.  The site allows you to reject responses that are not of the quality you feel is deserving of $1.00 (or less depending on how many you selected).  The site has some tips on usability testing and some guidance on how best to use the service with a nice little endorsement for Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think“.  For what you pay, you get a fair shake.

As part of my research, I read over comments in the sample reviews, I submitted my own request for review, assessed the responses and I also nosed around some discussion forums where Feedback Army was the topic de jour.

Certainly, this service has it’s benefits (particularly on your bottom line) but there are the typical responses from folks disappointed by their own misguided expectations.  Look, you can’t use a service like this, then complain when you’re not handed a glossy analysis of your user findings broken down by persona & scenario that map 1 to 1 with your research goals.  It just won’t happen.  So when you get shorthand “unintelligent” lol-speak responses you really can’t complain.  Some users may/may not follow your posting to the letter and may spout off whatever comes to mind…  that’s the level of expectation you should have going in.

What you don’t get…

User Demographics & Targeted Personas – you’re dreaming.  The reviewer pool comes from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – a crowd-sourcing work-in-progress.  While there are advantages here, there is limited control over who is actually doing the work.  The m-turk pool is 70% American… combine that with Feedback Army’s English only UI framework, and you’re limited to US domestic testing.

Quantitative Metrics – You won’t get time to completion and conversion rates,  and industry benchmarks.  If you outfit your test environment with Google Analytics, you can get at some success metrics around goals, popular content, and bounce rates, but with limited specificity on who’s feedback maps to which metrics.

Qualitative Metrics  – You can get if you’re explicit about ratings, but you’ll have to compile your own report if you want the pretty charts.

A Usability Report – this one is all you – if you played your cards right, you can get some decent raw feedback to compile into a report, but this requires a lot of planning.

How to make up the difference:

What are your research goals, what candidate  features/functions to test, what evaluation criteria, etc?  Ideally, you run a series of these to arrive at a more comprehensive view of your product’s usability, and compile the report in the end.  Hiring a consultant or using an internal dedicated resource to own this task will help ensure the value added direction setting and iteration planning for your product post feedback solicitation.

Loop 11

More recently we took a look at Loop 11.  Currently in private beta, Loop 11 is hooking up some usability testing bells and whistles.  I used ‘quotes’ around “usability testing” on my FeedbackArmy review because it’s really just a feedback machine.  Loop 11, however, has scratched the surface on tackling the tough stuff: Targeted Personas, Quantitative Metrics, Industry Benchmarks, and more.

What do will you get?

To be honest, I can’t tell you everything…  Loop 11′s closed beta is by invitation only.  Here’s what the site claims:

Create a user test. This is a lightweight form, but it takes more thought and detail than simply posting a URL.  A 3 step set up walks you through adding test details, tasks & questions and additional test options. The demo suggests you can organize tests into “projects” and save tests as templates.  (nice touch)

Invite test participants. This looks like a nice set of options: Get link to user test: presumably, you can send it out to a predetermined list of users (the ideal scenario), create pop-up invitation for your site: this gives you random users which may or may not be what you’re looking for (less ideal) or purchase from their panel users (needs investigation).  The site claims separation of test participants, making data roll up and drill down more interesting.

Everyone loves dashboards… so why not, a nice dashboard to give you high level data on average page views, avg. time per page, avg. task completion rate and average industry completion rates… That’s right, I said Industry Benchmarks.  Now that’s a rich claim – noting their closed beta partners, they’ve picked Amazon, Ikea, HSBC, Toyota…  these will be your benchmarks folks!  Not a bad competitive pool.  Well done Loop.

Here is a list of metrics you can get in the dashboard:

What you don’t might not get.

You already know that I can’t get a good handle on the truth here based on their current closed beta status.  But here’s a list of assumption you can make based on what they’ve exposed.  I found a posting by Ann Smarty who somehow got into their beta, she posted a light review here.

Validated qualitative metrics – you may get ratings, but you miss out on non-explicit reactions.  The classic,”users will say one thing but do another” is always in effect- you’ll get their feedback, but miss facial expressions, eye tracking, mouse hovering, heat mapping and general behavior surrounding their remarks.

That’s about it, it looks like you get a good set of data collection and analysis features – you still have to set up your test(s) properly.  This means well thought out targeted test goals and participant recruitment.

Online User Testing Service/Tool Limitations:

If you’ve found yourself staring down the barrel of some usability crowd-source projects you’re most likely dealing with tight time-frames and or budgets and you’ve ruled  out a lengthy and potentially costly full blown usability study.  What tips can you learn from user research professionals to make the most of your crowd-sourced efforts and build a design strategy from your study outputs?

1) You can’t meet everyone’s needs.  Take some time to look over the feedback and group them into “UI themes” or “issue categories”.  There will always be outliers – if your study was targeted and you knew the demographic weight of missing the mark on an outlier, then you can factor them in – or, if this outlier hit the exact note that all of the others missed – the note you have been attempting to hit…  then factor them in, but be careful not to upset the balance of maintaining a clear grasp of mass appeal.  You can alway run multiple targeted feedback sessions once you know what your issue categories are. Try your hand at feedback and observation analysis you may find affinity diagramming or mental modeling useful, but don’t forget to segment and simplify your feedback – “verb + noun = atomic task”.

2) User segmentation and personas.  Getting at the psychographics and demographics of your user takes a little extra time & thought and has very real user experience implications.  While no two users on any given system are the same, you can loosely characterize their behavior and relationship to information, objects and tasks into 3-6 types.  ex. Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Specialist, etc.  The more comprehensive your view of your users going into a study, the more focused your test and test results can be.

3) Reconciliation – User requirements and business requirements don’t always map1:1 to each other, and the technical architecture may or may not support all of the requirements. Map out your requirements into a functionality matrix where you look at all of the system functions and features, making sure that you account for all business and user requirements (using excel helps you stay concise and color coded).  Rank each item by business benefit, user benefit and technical complexity (H/M/L).  Use the matrix to build an iteration plan based on your ranking.

4) Mapping study results to information and interaction design strategy.  You may have a head for this, and if you do, you’ve most likely covered your bases, but it never hurts to get an outside opinion.  Great design is rarely achieved without a great deal of planning.  Knowing where you are, where you’ve come from and where you’re going at all points of development can keep your tests and iteration plans focused and practical.  Understanding how to meet the needs of your users in rapid order with a long range view of feature extensibility will go a long way towards keeping your product on track.

Additional on-line usability testing tools:

Lightweight Usability Checklist

Remote Eye Tracking Service

Concept Feedback

Web Review Community

Remote Task Analysis

Remote Usability Testing

Application Testing

Other (unrelated) Product Crowd-Sourcing Sites:

Graphic Design

Automobile Design (just because it’s cool)

Feedback

Freelancing

Happy testing all.  Remember: “Test early & test often”.  Don’t be afraid to admit you need help, we’re pretty good at what we do.

-Jon Fukuda

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