On Design…

The following diagram represents my opinion on what would be a good UX process.

UX Design Process Flow Sketch

When using the iPhone (or any Smartphone), why is it that you don’t feel the screen is too small or constraining when you watch a video as against using it to type in an email? Is it the movement on the screen or the addition of the Z-axis that adds depth and expands the screen space? Or is it that you are just a passive consumer of information and don’t necessarily interact with the screen? Using the device for games has a similar effect. You forget that the device has boundaries and you are totally immersed and engaged in the drama of the game environment -more like being actually drawn into the screen, and being sucked into the third dimension.

On the other hand, while trying to type something, it’s a 2D surface and the boundaries are more pronounced as you type a relatively long email and you tend to feel constrained in the space. More words on the screen emphasize the small screen size. While browsing web pages, you zoom in and don’t get the entire picture and that could make it feel a bit constraining too.

Do the boundaries vanish the more immersive the environment is?

How can typing a text be made more immersive so that boundaries fade away?

In countries like India where people are constantly being exposed to complexity - be it in everyday way finding or visual complexity of the buildings, they are constantly searching and navigating a complex landscape to find information they are looking for. On the other hand someone living in a developed nation where things are always aligned and in order, a simple shift in alignment can make way finding hard.

Do people from places with visual complexity and amorphous development (buildings for example) tend to naturally like complexity and those from places with a more structured development tend to gravitate towards simplicity?

Does your culture and context affect your perception of the simplicity and ease of use of a UI?

http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/24/cx_hc_0327worst_customer_service_slide.html

Online slide shows are they something that are useful especially when there is quite a bit of text to read in every slide?

Isn’t it user friendly to just provide a navigation that lets the user to advance from one slide to the other instead of having an autoplay option where the screen refreshes when the user is halfway through reading the text?

Recent experience at Forbes.com is what made me write this.

As I was watching the slide show and reading the information the screen would suddenly refresh and advance to a new slide. If I were to pause, I’d have to hit the ‘stop’ button and take my time to read without the worry of the stop clock ticking and the screen refreshing. Now, when I advance to the next slide, I assumed that since I hit the ‘stop’ button earlier, I’d have the option to control the slides manually. But no, the screen refreshes again. This meant that every time I wanted extra time to read or view a slide, I’d hit ‘stop’ in each slide while also advancing to the next one. Shouldn’t we be more considerate about the user?

Suggestion:

If we could separate the navigation to a time-based autoplay and a manual mode, it would tremendously help.

1. When the page loads, set it to the manual advance mode.
2. Provide an autoplay option with the different speed setting, which the user could use if required.
3. Don’t mix time-based and manual mode like it currently is.

This is 3M’s job site. (Refer Fig.1)
The first time I was in this page, as usual I tended to ignore the text and started looking for the keyword entry textbox, before which I tried to choose all the job categories. I expected a ‘Select All’ option, but couldn’t find one. So I had to go through the excruciating process of having to check every category. How could anyone not think of adding ‘Select all’ or ‘any’ as an option?
Fig.1
After my best though futile attempts to gloss over that lack of care for usability, I scrolled down to find the ‘Keyword’ field and entered the keyword and hit ‘Enter’ on the keyboard. Instant refresh and results are displayed…an empty ‘Job Postings List’. I assumed that there were no job openings, but it didn’t work even if i didn’t enter any keyword (as the knowledge i garnered through years of being online taught me that there should be all the open positions listed, if I don’t key in a specific word). (Refer fig2)

Fig.2
Only after a couple of tries did I realize that when I click on ‘Search’ button using the mouse it display the results. Shouldn’t all the buttons accommodate keyboard short key access?
I’m in awe at how attention to details has become a rarity and sometimes even some basic requirements too fall into that category!
Aren’t we all accustomed to hitting the ‘Enter’ key every time we login to check emails?
Imagine how terrorizing the very thought of having to use the mouse click to perform search on Google or logging in to email clients!
Just hope someone reads this and does something to alleviate the pain that a job-seeker already has to go through.

Boredom, free time and here’s an attempt at copywriting…

Client:
A software company specializing in automation and creating simplified and intuitive user interfaces…

Taglines
We’re not about just Bits ‘n Bytes
We simplify your life!

Life is already full of complications
Why not automate some,
And you’ll get time to live

Time is precious.
Spend it wisely on significant things
Automate the rest.

We spend our time, so that you can free yours for things that matter in life.
-Software Solutions
(a picture of a 8 year old with her mom, sharing stories of the day, at the park…(any intimate moment with friends family…) and the above quotes inconspicuously lining the base of the image)

We speak good old plain English

Translating Human language to Machine language…We’ll do the talking.

Interfacing made simple

Talk you’re language, we’ll try and understand you.

We sell time

You need to be just able to read plain English to use our software

Sometimes, it’s only plain old simple English it takes to communicate.

During a conversation with a friend, I was nonplussed when I heared that the ’sent message’ folder only has the option of saving the message sans the attachment. I hardly use Hotmail, except for once in a while logging in to keep the account alive. So it is no surprise I didn’t notice this feature (rather the lack of it). I still haven’t gotten over the fact that an email system could exist without the lack of such a vital functionality that comes standard with other email services. Another blatant lacuna was the lack of the option to save sent messages automatically without having to check the option to ’save the message’.

I still am in wonder…

Things will go wrong, the world ain’t a perfect place and systems do succumb to flaws. But that doesn’t mean one has to confound the already flustered user with technical jargons and strings of characters that are stringed in the most unintelligible fashion. people don’t talk machine language, so please speak their language. The image (flickr.com) shows an instance of a very friendly error message. It sure doesn’t annoy or fluster the user and infact brought a smile on my face when i read it. I became a little more forgiving than I usually would be. I wasn’t annoyed, instead I snapped a screenshot and decided to write a post about it.

Kudos to the power of copy! sometimes all it takes is good old plain english!!!