Insomnia

A few years ago, when I learned how AJAX worked, I immediately figured-out that, once you have reached a web site, every action you perform while using the site can be tracked by the site owner. That you didn't need to submit a form to send information to the server. This is a behaviour that you can plainly see when you use GMail.

However, yesterday, I surprised by this behaviour. I was shopping around for an online service. I found a place that seemed to qualify and was ready to make a purchase. I proceeded to the checkout page and started filling the form. I was almost done when I noticed some of the small print at the bottom of the page. After reading this, I realized that I didn't really understand what I was buying so I just closed the page without submitting the form.

A couple hours later, I got an email:

I can see from our records that you attempted to place an order with *service provider* today, but for some reason you ran into difficulties and the order was not completed.

To apologise for any problems you may have experienced, here's a special link to receive 50% off the usual cost of our *service*!

When you understand how the web works and you think about this. This is not super surprising. The checkout form was using AJAX to send the data in the checkout form as I was typing instead of waiting for me to push the submit button. When their system noticed that I never completed the purchase, it kicked-in an automated response.

The problem is that this is completely unexpected. It creeps me out a little that they recorded what I typed as I typed it. I had a feeling that we had an understanding: As long as I don't press the proceed button, you don't know anything about me.

Even if I was a little creeped-out, I did reply to the email and asked them a question about this fine-print text that I didn't understand and they responded quickly and provided me with a good experience overall.

But the question remains, is this behaviour creepy or is it a good customer experience?

Labels: design, security, tech

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So, November 13 is world usability day. I will be at the OCRI event to listen to the discussion and maybe participate. I am looking forward to the panel and to meet new people interested in usability and design.

Labels: design, work

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I was reading this article about the shocking steps that General Motors was taking to bootstrap their electric car project (called Volt). To allow themselves to innovate, they brought back a senior engineer from Germany and they threw all their processes out the window. The rest of the article describes how they peeled-off the industry's assumptions about car making (in general) and electric cars (in particular).

To me, one of the most interesting things that this article is the fact that they eventually realized that they cannot afford to just keep up with the Japanese car companies. They cannot play it safe. They had to "leapfrog" the competition and force them to follow their lead. This is the only way they could regain the technological edge.

The Volt is not available to customers yet. And it might still be a while before it is; But, according to the article, other car makers are already using the Volt's "technology" to design a new generation of electric cars. Even if the Volt never becomes a commercial success, the strategy already paid off for GM as it re-established them as innovators in their industry.

Labels: design, work

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I have been ranting about design for a while. However, I am not a designer, I am a software engineer dammit. I got all the design information that I know from books and blog posts.

I finally got it this week. I just finished reading Made to stick. I finally realize that it is not all the books with their statistics and theories about design and usability that stuck. It is the personal experience that I had years ago (with a previous employer) when I participated in a usability study of the software that my team was writing.

It was one of those one-way-glass usability studies where the developer team sits on the other side of the glass watching user after user struggle doing simple tasks with the software. It was a softphone type application and users had a lot of trouble just making a call. Despite the huge button that said "call" in the middle of the application window. Some of the developpers were litereally yelling at the glass: "Push the damn call button!"

The Made to stick book made me realize why this experience stuck with me. It was Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible and Emotional. Given the fact that I have a good story to tell about it, it scores a perfect 6 out of 6 on the stickiness scale.

I highly recommend this experience (witness a usability study of your software) to anyone involved with creating software. Then, tell me if it sticks with you.

Labels: design

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Since my employer got into the design business by acquiring a design firm, I have been trying to teach myself about design and how it is used in the software industry. It now seems obvious to me that properly designed software is the exception, not the norm. So, why is that?

Software companies are run by software engineers

Now, this is not a surprise to anyone but it has a major impact on the inability of design to penetrate software companies. Software engineers are "alpha people" they don't understand that they are the only ones that can figure-out how to use their software. I don't really want to expand on this because Allan Cooper did it much better than I could ever do it in The inmates are running the asylum.

Software people poo-poo waterfall

In his book, Cooper makes an analogy between the "design driven" software process and film making. You have pre-production, principal photography and post-production. When you tell this story to a software guy, the only thing he hears is waterfall. Then, he will promptly plug their ears with their index fingers and go "la la la la la... I can't hear you!".

The software world, especially in the past 5 years, the silver bullet has been agile methodologies. The software industry is blaming a lot of its past failures on the waterfall model and its inherent lack of flexibility. The whole industry has been moving towards a development model that lets team crank-out releasable product in small atomic iterations. If the "crazy customer/user" changes his mind, we only lose the work for the one iteration. Agile is not a process, it's a mitigation strategy. And the funny thing is that it is a mitigation strategy made indispensable by the lack of design.

What design brings in to the picture, and why it is not just another rebirth for waterfall, is that design is agile. It is interactive and it is flexible. And, by doing all the refactoring in pre-production, you don't have to throw away any expensive code.

You can launch a new product for 12000$

There is a lot of people that still believe that software is cheap. They read articles like this one and think that they can build gmail for that price. When you think that software is cheap, it is no wonder that you don't want to take the time to do proper design and save some money.

And this is a further obstacle because even software companies fall into that trap and keep thinking that they can make the development process cheaper. They should know better by now. They try to put new fangled processes in place to reduce the cost of the software, they adopt new tools to make development faster and they attempt to move the development to "lower cost environments". But ultimately, what costs money are failed projects and useless features.

If you are trying to build a digg-clone-social-media-crowdsourced-web 2.0 application, go ahead and hack away at it. You can probably put it together for 12000$. But anytime you're going to solve a new problem or try to solve an old problem in a better way... It is going to cost you actual money.

Good design is invisible

One of the main issues about good design is that it is invisible. It gets out of the way to let you do your job. When is the last time you entered a store and went: "Wow, that door was really well designed, I had no trouble finding the handle and opening it". It is really hard to put a value on something that is invisible. Features in software are visible. They can be sold and promoted. Well designed features are not easier to sell than badly designed ones because the good design is impossible to describe, it's invisible.

Design is only apparent in two cases: When it is in your way and when you pay attention to it. When it is in your way is easy to detect. You just get frustrated when you try to use something. Companies end up having to staff a call center full of people to answer customer calls.

So how do you detect good design? You don't need to be a designer to know enough to pay attention to design. You just need to educate yourself a little. In between books about Ruby on Rails and Agile estimating, toss in a book about design once in a while:

Start with The design of everyday things. You will start seeing the world around you in a completely different light. I promise you will never walk into a mall without looking at the door handles again.

If you are a software person, read About Face 3: the essentials of interaction design. It is a big book but don't worry, it has lots of pictures. It is full of theory but it is not enough to make you a designer. I can guarantee that you will find in there examples of things that you have actually implemented that are big design no-no's.

If you are involved in any way with the construction, marketing or sale of software products, you should also add The inmates are running the asylum to your reading list.

Labels: design

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Yesterday, I was getting my car serviced (winter tires... you gotta do what you gotta do). While I was waiting, something caught my eye. Another customer that was waiting in the lounge stood up and went for a coffee. I observed as she stood there trying to figure-out how to get coffee out of the fancy machine. You know, one of those machines that makes single-serving "gourmet" coffee.

She found the drawers with the coffee pouches. Picked the roast she wanted. Then, stood there unable to figure-out where the pouch went. When she felt that the machine had humiliated her enough, she put the pouch back and made a beeline for the restroom. She made it back to her seat and resumed reading the paper.

After seeing this, I decided to go and try it for myself. I am a "muddler" I will persistently muddle through a problem until I reach a conclusion. That is the only reason that I was able to extract a cup of coffee out of the machine. There is no obvious way to open the machine up to put the pouch in. You have to first start the machine by pushing the "coffee" button. Only then did the drawer open and let me put the coffee pouch in. when I put the pouch in, it went right through the drawer and landed on the table. It turns out that I had put it upside down. After trying a second time. I was finally successful.

Did they ever test this machine with real users? That machine would have made a great example in The design of everyday things. It looks really good. It probably won design contests. But it makes the users feel like they are idiots.

Labels: design

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In this blog, there is a boatload of information about the decisions taken by the UI team at Microsoft when they redesigned the user interface for the new office suite.

Hours of good reading ahead.

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : The Office 2007 UI Bible

Labels: design, work

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Recently, the company I work for acquired a user experience design firm. They are a group of folks that I have known for a while and with which we have successfully completed many projects.

Although it is not a corporate objective for me, I decided to make it my personal mission to better understand what it is they did. I had a pretty good idea of what that was but I needed something concrete. Walking through a bookstore this weekend I stumbled on About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design and immediately started devouring it. After a few chapters, I am starting to understand.

For a guy like me who has been in the software industry for over 10 years now. This book is a great eye opener. For once, it is us (the software guys) who are made to feel like idiots instead of the users. Most of what we've been doing when interacting with users is wrong.

The book describes the basis of "Goal-Directed design". How a good interaction designer will create a design that helps the user achieve its goals. Throughout the course of the book, you learn about some design axioms like:

• Nobody wants to remain a beginner
• Imagine the user as very intelligent but very busy
• Don't make the user feel stupid
• Design for the probable case; provide for the possible case
• Ask forgiveness, not permission
• Disks and files don't help users achieve their goals

And a whole whack more.

This book is not about turning people into interactive design practitioners. It is about understanding the value of good design. I would definitely recommend it to anyone involved in the creation of software.

Labels: design, work

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