brunobergher::blog

Kyle Meyer, from Astheria, ran a very informative review on Silverback, the Mac-only usability testing software by the folks at Clearleft, currently in beta testing.

The app seems very useful, on the verge of must-have, appropriately using native Mac features to record usability testing sessions. It generates a Quicktime movie of the screen capture of the session, with a thumbnail view of the user (shot by the built-in iSight camera) and recorded ambient audio (via the build-in microphone) which can be viewed, analyzed and shared of other team members.

Please do click through to Meyer’s review, and take the opportunity to enjoy Astheria’s design, which is probably the most beautiful blog design I’ve seen in while.

I signed up for Twitter a few minutes ago (I’m arriving a bit late to this, I know). So far I have no opinion on the service/phenomenon itself, but there’s one thing I can tell. When loading contacts from other services, this screen is presented to you:

And this kind of witty copy writing (the ‘popular’ thing) is inviting in a whole different level than unusual. It can make you like the service before you even start using it. And a user with a positive stance towards the application is as good as it gets for the first step for a successful interaction.

Jakob Nielsen published a few days ago his findings from research on the way users performance differs along the 25-60 years old range.

The article is definitely worth reading, is not long, and brings some interesting information.

In a nutshell, Nielsen found out that, according to his sample of 61 users, user performance (time spent to achieve each task) increases linearly by 0.8% by year, up to this 60 year old mark (beyond that this number increases faster). But the thing that caught my attention the most as this paragraph:

There’s also a covariant: the age at which people started using the Web. Because the Web is relatively new, a 50-year-old might have started using it at age 40, whereas a 30-year-old might have started at age 20. In contrast, by 2050, a 50-year-old will have used the Web since age 5, and thus benefit from 45 years of experience. A 30-year-old user in 2050 will have only 25 years’ Web experience. This added experience might eventually allow older users to catch up and somewhat reduce the 0.8% gap. Although we obviously can’t predict the future, my guess is that the age penalty will drop to around 0.5%/year. Still, this doesn’t matter much for your Web strategy over the next 10 years: the 0.8% level is where we’re at and where we’ll remain for some time.

We design for a medium that is new to anyone, and which is currently more attractive to younger people (for a while). It surely doesn’t affect designing for the web for now, but it’s interesting to consider that in a few decades, older people with effectively have more computer and web experience than young ones, and this will turn the playing field in a different direction.

It’s also worth of notice his assertion that when designing for people older than 60 requires a whole different approach, and perhaps, in some cases, a different interaction flow than from other users. Kind of like a ’seniors only’ line in a supermarket or bank.

Jeffrey Mindich contributed to this post in the Freakonomics blog over at the NYT website with an interesting story about Taiwan’s solutions to traffic accidents.

About a year ago, in order to reduce the number of accidents in some intersections in the country, they introduced traffic lights with countdowns of two kinds, one in which the light counts down to zero until it turns green, in the other until it turns red.

What’s really interesting is the difference in the results with the two varieties of lights:

• In the first one, countdown to green, the number of accidents was cut in half;
• In the second one, the number of injuries doubled.

People clearly speed up when facing a green light about to turn red, but get calmer when they know in how many seconds it’s going green, and are less likely to gun it.

This translates easily to interfaces. A while ago Chris Harrison published a study called ‘Rethinking the Progress Bar‘, which shows that a progress bar that is slower towards the beginning of the process and faster towards the end is perceived by users as much faster than a linear progress bar, even if the actual time spent in both are exactly equal.

I think these are two practical examples of the same principle:

1. When showing progress to users, make it seem as fast as possible, even if it brings along a slight distortion of the actual progress;
2. Provide the user with practical checkpoints in the process, to discourage her from giving up on a computer-intensive or remotely processed task that invariably takes some time.

Either way, never forget you have an implicit deal with the user of never lying to her: the goal here is to improve perceived performance, not to fake benchmarks.

(This is the first of what I hope becomes a series of posts on books I finish reading. I hope any of this ends up being useful to someone.)

I don’t plan to review Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability in any new way; 411 people have done it so far in Amazon.com alone. Considering at least 100,000 people have already read this, you can take it for granted that it’s a good book. I guess I’m writing to convince you to read it as soon as possible (if you don’t have already, of course).

Upon receiving it at home, I was surprised to see how thin it is: the Brazilian edition which I bought (I’ll get back to it shortly) is only 127 pages long; it seemed like a very introductory, superficial book. I guess I’m more used to judging a book’s by it’s length than I thought, and got punched in the face with that unfair assumption later on. In fact, the author himself aimed to conceive something ‘that could be read in a single airplane trip’.

Let me just tell you this: just 50 pages on, I was already quoting Krug all day long in discussions at work. His ideas are so simple, make so much sense and are so generic that, if you’re designing/developing interfaces (web-based or not) you’ll see yourself constantly in situations where Krug can help you. His common sense approach just becomes something you take with yourself, and put before the many obscure considerations people end up having when discussing project details.

It’s also interesting to see how the examples in the book—which are only two years old in many cases—are already outdated, while the principles he shares are more up-to-date than ever. His ideal definition of a home page has become the standard template of Web 2.0 sites (big, clear company statements with big call-to-action buttons and links); and even though Krug barely mentions web-apps in the text, everything he writes just fits in perfectly to them.

Summing up: huge recommendation, for anyone involved in sites/software design/development/management/conception.

* Note on the Brazilian edition: if you’re a fellow Brazilian, avoid the AltaBooks edition at all costs. Really. Run from it like you’d run from the devil. Page layout is terrible, with no margins whatsoever, reaaaaaaaaaally long sentences, the footnote references are all screwed up, a lot of bad translations. In many cases the book tears apart the usability principles Krug is explaining in that very page. I’m thinking of warning him about this, if can manage to get in touch.

If you can read the English in this blog, you deserve a good edition—as I believe the original one is. So go for it.

Wenetus Interactive, a brazilian web development company reversed the usual order of fields in a contact form:

Instead of the usual name, e-mail, message order, the form first asks what the visitor wants to say (something that is in her mind, for sure) to only later ask for contact information.

It’s a really simple point, but I believe it makes a big difference on how the visitor perceives the interest the company has on what she has to say.

Matt at signal vs. noise noted the sliding images that explain how the Beanstalk, a hosted Subversion system, works.

I find that interesting, but what really caught my attention was the simplicity of the sign-up process: they only offer you the option of signing up for a free account. That way you don’t feel that the service is being sold to you, but rather that they’re offering you an opportunity to enjoy something good.

THAT is user-friendliness and inviting for business, because we have to be realistic: there’s no way someone is going to choose a paid option without checking out the free one first, standing right next to it.

So I finally got to try Buzzword. And believe be: at least my first impression is that it’s really something amazing. A sleek, intuitive interface, features that are both handy and easy to use, document sharing, fast loading. You know, it’s all that. The reasons why Adobe has acquired Virtual Ubiquity, the company behind this software, are cristaline now.

Some features I’d highlight so far:

• The interface, of course: it’s not only beautiful, but very intuitive, hiding what doesn’t need to be used at the moment, while making it very easy to get to the other features whenever needed;
• Real fonts: you’re not stuck with Times, Verdana or whatever’s bundled with your OS. The starting pack offers Adobe Garamond, NewsGothic and Minion, among others all in Opentype format. And the Adobe acquisition surely has much more good things to offer in the typography department;
• Offline editing;
• Easy to use commenting system, ready for multiple users;
• Simple but comprehensive history for tracking changes in the document;
• Very good printing quality and fidelity to the original document;
• The insightful vertical scroll-bar, which shows page numbers;

And all of these in a seamless, ‘just-feels-right’ way that GoogleDocs has not be able to achieve so far. The only feature I missed was paragraph/character styles. For the remaining, it does a remarkable job on the set of features that matter for 90% of the users.

Microsoft, watch out. The online office is just around the corner, and Adobe is going strong at it.