Microsoft: Office 2007 Addresses Bloat Issue
As a really novel change of pace, Microsoft decided to check with users about their next behomoth project, Office 2007.

Microsoft Office developers have long been aware of user concerns about bloat in the product, and they have been conducting extensive research and usability testing to address it, said Mark Alexieff, a senior product manager in the company's Information Worker Product Management group, at the annual TechEd developer conference here June 12.
"We heard a lot about bloat from the press and users with Office 2003, the last release of the product. As such, we focused the design goals for the client applications in Office 2007 System on making the software easier to use, on saving people time, and making it easier for users to discover more of its functionality," he said.

Software that's easier to use, saves people time and makes it easier for them to discover more of the functionality. Wow, what a concept. I'm not entirely holding my breath, since I haven't really noticed Microsoft downscaling releases--mostly they just ditch functionality in order to make a release date. A nod to JLeroy, if they just downsized the expectations and released early and added functionality afterwards, we'd all be less likely to say they didn't meet our overly high expectations.

ShopWiki wants to making online shopping more usable
http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3599961

ShopWiki, a company formed by two former DoubleClick execs, aims to change online shopping comparisons with a novel concept. They want to make it work more like the USERS of the system want it to work...

"When comparison shopping sites were built five years ago, they were built from the merchant's perspective. We're building ShopWiki from the consumer's point of view," Kevin Ryan, ShopWiki's founder and CEO, told ClickZ News.

Instead of only showing you merchants who paid to be included, they crawl all over the online shopping world. They don't just show what merchants want you to see, they show you what USERS want to see.

Google Seeks Patent for Targeting Ads on Wi-Fi Hotspots

According to ClickZ, the US Patent Office published a patent request for Google to set up targeted adds on Wifi spots. According to the article:

It describes a method by which an end user accessing the Internet via a wireless access point (WAP) would be served advertisements based on factors such as the geographic location of the WAP, a behavioral profile of users of the WAP, the vertical market served by the WAP's owner, or other predetermined criteria.

Location-based search, especially for mobile users, has broad implications for content providers and advertisers. Geographically targeting users at such a precise level could benefit local advertisers especially, or those that have products that might be available locally. Marketers could also use profiles of the neighborhood as a basis for targeting ads.

This seems like such an interesting idea. While it's mostly about marketing, it seems to stray into usability to us, since it's providing information that would be the most useful to the user based on where they happen to be.

Boulder Company Gets Googled
http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/local_business/article/0,1713,BDC_2461_4542752,00.html

This last week, we've been playing with a product called SketchUp, which is a 3D design software package. We have been marvelling at the ease of this pretty complex tool, but we were really impressed by the tutorials. Instead of a tutorial that just runs a movie, this tutorial system is built into the software. You see the instruction and then you actually perform the action with the actual software. What a leap this was in ease of use! Carolanne said she downloaded some CAD software that she couldn't even figure out how to draw a line with, and with SketchUp, she designed a whole house.

@Last Software, the makers of SketchUp are a company we've watched closely--literally. When we moved into our offices, they were crowded into every square inch of the space downstairs. A few years ago, they bought the Mountain Sports building on Pearl, and within about a year, they outgrew that space and moved down the other direction on Pearl Street.

So we had our eye out when today's news hit that they had been acquired by Google. And the really fun thing is that they are staying in Boulder, so now Boulder will have a Google presence on Pearl St. It seems @Last was working with Google on another supremely cool program, Google Earth. That project also involves another local company, Longmont-based DigitalGlobe.

All of this is great news for Boulder, to be sure. And it's fun to have watched some of the progression.

According to Forrester Research, companies are discovering that they would like to shift their customers to self service channels such as the web because of the related cost savings. They are also discovering that one of the best ways to do this is to improve their usability. So, it's looking like more companies are figuring out what we know--Customer Experience Matters.


http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2006/03/03/customer_experience_budgets_to_increase/
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Customer Experience Budgets to Increase
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The majority of corporate decision-makers said they would boost analytics and customer behavior research budgets, according to "Customer Experience Spending Booms in 2006," a report published last month by Forrester Research, writes DM News (via MediaBuyerPlanner). Also, 65 percent of companies said a top priority was to shift customer interactions to the internet.

Related Topics
e-commerce
measurement & analytics
multi-channel marketing
signs of what's to come
user experience

The research also found that the customer experience channels not getting more money this year included applications, automated phone centers, kiosks, speech recognition and surveys.

Respondents said they want to shift more customers to self-service channels - and they've found that improving usability is the most effective way to accomplish that goal.

Over 300 decision-makers make up the Customer Experience Research Panel that was questioned on how they plan to spend money in 2006.

Blind Cal student sues Target
Suit charges retailer's Web site cannot be used by the sightless

reported in the San Francisco Chronicle Wednesday, February 8, 2006

"Target thus excludes the blind from full and equal participation in the growing Internet economy that is increasingly a fundamental part of daily life," said the suit, which seeks to be certified as a class action and alleges violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and various state statutes.

Advocates for the blind said the lawsuit is a shot across the bow for retailers, newspapers and others who have Web sites the blind cannot use. They chose Target because of its popularity and because of a large number of complaints by blind patrons.

"What I hope is that Target and other online merchants will realize how important it is to reach 1.3 million people in this nation and the growing baby-boomer population who will also be losing vision," said plaintiff Bruce Sexton Jr., 24, a blind third-year student at UC Berkeley.

Sexton, who is president of the California Association of Blind Students, said making Target's Web site accessible to the blind would also make it more navigable by those without vision problems.

I use Target's website and I would have to agree with the navigation. Target is one of those interesting cases where there are brick and mortar stores, but there are plenty of web only items on the website. I'm glad to see this type of case go forward since I think there are distinct points where access is barred to some of their goods and services.

You can read the whole article at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/08/MNGO7H4VBP128.DTL

Corporate Ethnography

High-tech companies are deploying ethnographers and anthropologists by the score to study how people actually use technology. http://www.technologyreview.com/wtr_15900,1,p1.html?trk=nl

Finally we are starting to see more of a very interesting technique that helps us to understand how people think about technology.

"ethnography is gaining credence in the corporate world as a form of market research. Ethnography focuses on a qualitative examination of human behavior. In a corporate setting, ethnographers typically examine how people treat a product, say, a mobile phone, in the context of their lives. Ethnographic researchers at the EPIC could be divided into seven general types: sociologists, human factors and computer interface specialists, computer scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, MBAs, and design specialists."

If you want to know who people really do with technology, it's good to go out there and see them use it. We did some interesting ethnography work, for example, with truck drivers using an interface to communicate with their dispatch operator. We uncovered things in the field that you really just couldn't have found out if you asked them to come to a lab.

Marketing groups are starting to see that if you can really understand HOW your customers interact with their technology, it is easier to market products to them. In our work, we often try to use techniques such as contextual inquiry, where we go to the customer and sit with them while they work, collecting data and asking questions while they do their work. In this way, we can see the things we would never notice otherwise, like post-it notes with reminders or cheatsheets for commands they forget.