Johnny Mellgren’s Blog

Yesterday I held another usability talk. This time at HiQ in Stockholm. 20 consultants interested in usability, user experience and prototyping gave me a decent 4 out 5 rating on their evaluation form. Thanks guys.

Two weeks ago I held another usability talk, this time at Södertörns högskola. The course was ”IT in tourism” and my focus was what usability is, how online travel agents use web sites to sell their products and common problems that arise. A trip is quite a complex product and designing user interfaces for complex products is always difficult. I’d say that 99% of all online travel agents ask users the following questions:

1. Where do you want to travel?
2. From where?
3. When?
4. When do you want to go back home?
5. How many people are you travelling with?

An obvious usability issue with this solution is that these questions are pretty difficult to answer if you’re just browsing for prices or looking for places to travel to during your next holiday in five months. On the other hand, for business trips it’s quite easy to answer them. To me this means that the user interfaces of most online travel agencies are for business users (“B2B”) and not for the leisure group (“B2C”).

Thank you Peter Hellman for inviting me to talk to your class.

In the midst of the global financial crisis I decided to go banking at another bank in Sweden where I live. Since a majority of Swedes, myself included, do their banking tasks online, getting familiar with the new banks website is an experience you just have to go through.

The SEB.se website is a classic example of how not to do with your company contact information. Trying to find a number to call, I found myself reading through ALL the items in the top- and left menus for the correct link to click. Where did the designers put the information? In a separate box way out to the right in the periphery. Why on earth isn’t there a “Contact us”-link in the main or left menu where users look first?
I bet there was a discussion where someone said that the contact information is so important that it has to have a little box of its own. A classic example of a counter productive solution: “Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored“.

Last week I attended a Trippus event at the Royal Viking Hotel in Stockholm where Samuel Smith from Shockfish presented the Swiss Spotme device. In short the device helps attendees at large fairs and conferences find each other among thousands of participants. I didn’t have time to check out the details of the user interface that much but it kind of reminded me of an old Nintendo Game and Watch device I used to play with as a kid. Since the device is lended out to participants and not sold to end-users the feel of it is kind of large and not that neat (it also has to sustain a lot of damage). You navigate using the arrow-like buttons on the right hand side and I’m sure the next version will have a touch screen since this is the general trend in device design. Anyway, what really caught my attention wasn’t really the design of the device or the interface, but rather the human problem this device helps to solve. Since the device helps you find new contacts and the fact that everyone at the venue will have one and the fact that the device itself serves as the preferred medium of information exchange at these venues actually constitutes an icebreaker, if you will, helping people to overcome their usual fears of talking to strangers. Users will always have this in common and thus a natural topic to discuss with each other. This is also an important aspect of usability: how can we overcome basic human constraints using technology and design to alter user experience in a specific context.

According to Reuters, Dell is “testing a new digital music player”. Since Dell dropped out of the MP3-player race a few years ago canceling their “Dell Pocket DJ” series Apple has taken a staggering 70% market share with their iPod way ahead of the nearest competitors Microsoft and Creative at about 4% each. So, when Dell is at it again, I do hope for their own sake (read shareholders sake) that they take user experience seriously, doing extensive user testing and taking Donald Normans maxim “the product is more than the product, it is the entire user experience” into account. Just take a look at the difference in user experience when using the Dell Pocket DJ and the Apple iPod for the first time. “First impressions lasts”, ey? I’ve heard somewhere that Apple spends about 5 USD on packaging per unit for the iPod. This is also a great way to build a strong relationship between the product (the brand) and the user, using user experience strategically.

(And, yes, I know the business models of Apple and Dell are quite different and yes Dell sells everything online while Apple also sells their products off the shelf in stores – however it’s still possible to remain an on-demand e-commerce company and attain better user experience through better packaging…)

Banner blindness as a usability phenomenon has been well known now for at least ten years through the research of Jakob Nielsen and NNGroup. In short banner blindness describes the fact that users ignore content that looks like banner ads. This means that promoting real content on your homepage and giving it a fancy appearance can sometimes be counter productive if the promoted content looks like a banner ad. Now, here’s an example of what Jakob Nielsen describes as an unethical method to make ads look like content. E24.se is a Swedish news website covering global business. A few months back this kind of banner ads begun appearing (take a look at the “Welton Way” section). This banner ad is cleverly masquerading as real content inviting business newsreaders to click on it. This method was already back in 2004 considered the third most hated advertising technique by users. Wile certainly effective, still a highly unethical design move by the banner makers. Also, personally, I think E24 should think twice before accepting banner ads designed as content since it clearly has a negative effect on user experience.

Wow! I just love it. Beeing a total Mac newbie I find new features in OS X every day that just makes life a little easier. Since I use Axure quite a lot when I’m prototyping uploading the generated html-files to our development server takes a lot of time. In a project for a large online player in the travel industry here in Sweden I’ve been pushing Axure to the maximum(?) and the prototype right now is about 2000 files! So, I thought I’d try the Automator application… 10 minutes later I have an automated action to sync my local prototype folder with the folder on the development server using Transmit, packing everyting to a zip archive and moving it to an “uploaded prototypes” folder. This saves me about 20 minutes a day… That’s probably about 100 hours a year or 9000 Euros in savings for my clients! That’s usability for you… Quite frankly I didn’t understand why the Recorder application from Windows 3.11 never made it to Windows 95 through XP and onwards. I used Recorder a lot back in the days and now with Automator on the Mac I can make global macros using a drag-and-drop interface. Thank you Apple!

Yesterday I had a workshop with Andreas Krohn from Digitalistic on mashups together with a client of mine in the online travel industry. Andreas showed us OpenKapow and how easy it is to do web scraping, put data from all over the web into a new web service. Really cool! Just point, click, drag and drop and select your preferred output such as RSS or REST. And all this in minutes! The business opportunities with mashups and modern web technologies are just endless. All you really have to ask yourself is what do you want to do? And why the heck are you doing what your doing right now? Andreas took the big step a few months ago and he’s now an entrepreneur launching his own web services using mashups as well as consulting… I’ll certainly keep an eye on what ever he comes up with… great stuff!

Today I held a talk on usability at Karolinksa Institutet. The seminar was organized by the staff at KIs information department and the audience was about 80 people evolved in managing the KI website using the CMS Polopoly. KI.se is one of Sweden’s largest websites with about 200 content managers.

I had great fun! I love giving talks about my favorite topic. Thanks KI for the opportunity and for the lovely book.

From the KI.se website:
Karolinska Institutet is one of Europe’s largest medical universities. It is also Sweden´s largest centre for medical training and research. Our mission is to improve the health of mankind through research and education.

After 15+ years on Microsoft Windows I’ve finally switched to the Mac OSX. I’ve agonized over this for several years because I know how much effort it takes to learn a completely new user interface. I’ve also wanted to switch ever since my friend Olle told me he totally revolutionized the efficiency of his work as a motion graphics professional when switching. About a year ago my colleague and business partner Jakob also switched and haven’t looked back since and now I figured I had to learn Vista sooner or later anyway so why not switch to OSX and stop being angry about the bloated user interface world of Microsoft, right?

For all of you out there agonizing, stop. Actually it’s quite fun and not as big of a leap as you might think. Some things are different, some things are the same but all in all I’m happy I did it. Also, using Parallels and Boot Camp you can still boot up ye olde Windows partition if you feel home sick… I’ll certainly do it quite frequently until Axure releases an OSX version… Any good prototyping tools for OSX?