Quintus Design

2006-06-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-03-24T11:30:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-03-15T13:26:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-03-03T14:19:00.000-08:00

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/
Home » Archives » 2006 » Mar » 03 » Customer...
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.

2006-02-28T12:47:00.000-08:00

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

2006-01-05T09:03:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-01-05T08:50:00.000-08:00

Blogging in the New Year
Well, I just hit the New Year and realized that the end of last year ended up with very little blogging on our part, so it's time to roll it back out again.

I also discovered that some of my emails were bouncing because my signature file contained my email address, our web address and our blog address. Yup, 3 links, which turned me into spam according to some spam filters. The aggrevating part is that I didn't realize that some email wasn't going through immediately. Now, I could try something like putting my signature information into an image file, but that wouldn't be accessible without all the same info, and that would trigger other spam filters. So now I rely on the inferential powers of my correspondees to figure out that our website is probably just www.quintusdesign.com.

Which in fact, it is.

2005-11-08T13:17:00.000-08:00

What's in a name?

The other day I was working with some photos on istockphoto. I love istockphoto, where the stockphotos are royalty free and very very very inexpensive, which makes it nice for the occassional web developer person like me. I noticed this interesting thing about their site, that falls into this usability issue. You can save photos to a "lightbox" so you can view them together.

Lightbox is a great metaphor for people who have worked with photography. You get the idea right away--you can put your slides or photos on them for viewing. And from a usability perspective, we wholeheartedly recommend using the names people understand.

Years ago, for example, a local phone company in our area was calling the link to their wireless division "PCS Services" on their home page. They were marketing the name and they loved it. But users of the site didn't know what it meant--they were looking for words like "wireless" or "cellular". Changing the name of the link to "wireless" increased the clickthrough rate dramatically.

But then sometimes the name that makes sense as you move from one area into another loses it's original meaning. Lightbox, for example, is likely to be a good metaphor now, but as more people do web development without ever working with slides or photos on a lightbox, will it stop making sense?

In statistics, we talk about a "split plot" design. Want to know why? Because the statistical test was developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to evaluate crop rotation in continuously planted plots of land (the Morrow Plots, continuously planted since 1876). We used to define "cards" for one stats package because of the old computer cards you used when you ran programs in the 60's. I still remember the boxes and boxes of punched paper cards from my dad's dissertation research, but the analogy had long since stopped making sense and just seemed like a confusing name for variables.

So what is in the name? In general, you should call things by the names that make sense to people who use your products and services. You can spend a lot of money on marketing to try and convince them to call something by a different name; you can also spend a lot of money trying to corner the market with a brand name (that's why drug companies spend tons trying to convince you that you want Claritin tm and not Loratadine--if you hit the Claritin website, you'll even discover that they don't even use the generic compound name Loratadine). But if there's a name out there that people understand and use, then use that name. You can be cute if you want, but if you want high conversions, go with the name people understand. If you aren't sure what that is, ask someone.

2005-11-02T12:48:00.000-08:00

USA TODAY jumps in with an article about Usability in their Money section
View the article

Today's USA Today ran an article on how Usability impacts company performance. It's highlighted because of World Usability Day tomorrow, but it had some additional interesting information. Gotta love the last line of this article snip...

The phenomenal success of Apple's easy-to-use iPods is instructive: Companies that successfully unveil usable products aren't just providing a nice service; it's good business, too. Companies that excel in usability can boost their return on "usability" investment more than 100-to-1, estimates Randolph Bias, a University of Texas professor who co-wrote the book Cost-Justifying Usability.

Why? Simpler-to-operate products tend to sell better, and a company can spend less on tech support.

But some tech engineers and designers assume too much: that since they understand how the gadget works, everyone should. Bias quips: "A whole lot of companies went out of business because their users were too stupid."

2005-11-01T13:23:00.000-08:00

The secret of making things work from the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4393468.stm

The BBC has caught the news of the World Usability Day festivities and has reported on the ways in which usability has changed the approach of many successful companies (a nod to the quote from Martin Hardee, one of our clients at Sun).

It is interesting how many times we hear about the debates between usability, marketing and development teams. We just heard about it several times when we gave our seminar from folks who were trying to figure out how to make a case for usability in their organizations but had been bumping into other groups/interests.

But the industrial world is still structured around the defined areas of marketing, design, audience research and product development.

And how a "cross-channel" approach fits into that model hasn't yet been definitively established, says Phil Terry of New York consultancy Creative Good.

"These divisions are so strong that in many cases an outsider can draw an internal organization chart based only on the website, store, or computer chip," he says. "We call this 'showing your organizational underpants'.

"The bad news is that the only thing that typically unites marketing, design, product development, strategy, etc is that they are all not looking at the business from the customers' point of view."

The companies that succeed will be those that learn from the pioneers in the field of usability and break down these barriers, ultimately putting the user at the centre of their approach.

It seems that making something easy to use is not as easy as it seems.

2005-10-31T18:06:00.000-08:00

World Usability Day and Other Quintus Happenings

As we end out October, I realized it has been a while since I posted to our blog. It seems my good intentions fall into the hole of all the other things that have been happening at Quintus. Our usability seminar on October 21 was a huge success, and our participants walked away with good introductory usability training and a funky toy to boot. One of our principals, Erika Noll Webb, spoke three times in the Chicago area, on Accessibility and the Design Process (how to move faster and more efficiently by building accessibility into the design process). And now we are rolling into November, curious to see how World Usability Day on November 3rd will be received by the world community.

It's always interesting to see how Usability Professionals can make a case for Usability in the world market. In the next few days, we'll try to get more onto our blog to see if we can't add to the buzz....

2005-09-29T16:08:00.000-07:00

World Usability Day
http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/worldusabilityday/
The Usability Professionals Association has developed World Usability Day. Hooray! A holiday. Information on coordinating a local event is available by joining the discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UsabilityDay but here's some more information about it from their press release.

"Why doesn't this work better? Why can't they make this easier?” World Usability Day, November 3, 2005, is for all the people who've ever asked questions like these.

This worldwide series of events, organized by The Usability Professionals' Association, will promote awareness of the benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design, Earth Day style. Events are planned in more than 70 cities in 35 countries.

2005-09-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

Designing cool things for people with disabilities...
"Design students who create products for disabled people are hoping to attract the attention of manufacturers at an exhibition in London this week."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4272516.stm

Mr Goodland conducted research among people aged over 65.

He found that items which were the most difficult to use were video recorders, vacuum cleaners, central heating timers and telephones.

He decided to concentrate on timers and phones because both are vital to a person's well-being.

Among telephone users, he found the most common problem was dialling.

Highlights of Independent Living 2005

In pictures

In order to overcome this he designed a photo frame holder into which pictures of the person whose number is required can be inserted.

The user simply has to tap the photo or the holder in order to dial the correct number.

He says it has the added advantage of working with an existing phone, avoiding the need to learn to use a new handset.

Over 65--that's a big market of folks. Making technology work for them is a pretty cool idea.

2005-08-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

What are three young Griffindors doing on an accessibility blog post?

Stunningly enough, they are part of www.jkrowling.com/, the official website of J. K. Rowling, which is Flash and accessibility enabled.

In a posting to the Universal Access group at the Trace Center, Gregg Vanderheiden said:

It has implemented accessibility features and was written up by the Universal Design Education Newsletter as a paragon of accessibility.....

If one believes that parallel optimized content is a good approach – this is a fascinating example.
If one believes that one format should meet all – then this is a separate but equal approach.
Currently the new guidelines are trending toward accessible form should be available from the same URI which is true for the home page from which the flash launches.

What a great idea--for all the people who are Harry Potter fans.

2005-08-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

Creating a business case for web accessibility

For years, a theme has come up on various accessibility lists asking if anyone knows of a good business case for accessibility. Recently the WAI created one for web accessibility, which is certainly a good place to start. This excerpt gives a flavor of the problem many of us have faced in trying to convince companies that there is money to be made in doing their website right.

"The Web is an increasingly important resource in many aspects of life: education, employment, government, commerce, health care, recreation, and more. The Web is used for receiving information as well as providing information and interacting with society. Therefore it is essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities. An accessible Web also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging.

There are initial costs for organizations implementing Web accessibility; however, the initial costs are often offset by a full return on investment. In order to be willing to invest the initial costs, many organizations need to understand the social, technical, and financial benefits of Web accessibility and the expectations of the returns throughout the organization. The justification to commit resources to a project is often called a "business case". Business cases usually document an analysis of the project's value in meeting the organization's objectives, the cost-benefit analysis, and the expected outcomes."

The rest of the article can be found on the W3C's WAI pages.

2005-08-15T13:28:00.000-07:00

PRESS RELEASE IBM Contributes Open Source Code to Make FireFox Browser More Accessible

Link: PRESS RELEASE IBM Contributes Open Source Code to Make FireFox Browser More Accessible.

Yippee! This is one of those things I'm always glad to see. I use multiple browsers but frankly get pretty frustrated with IE and the amount of spyware I get slammed with when I use it. However, working on accessibility issues, I tend to focus on IE use because that's what my screenreaders are optimized for. However, it looks like IBM has teamed up with Mozilla to make Firefox more accessible, a move that can only be good.

2005-08-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

Rich interaction with internet applications
Rich interaction with internet applications has recently become possible with new technologies like ruby on rails, Laszlo, and Macromedia Flex. These technologies offer users interaction capabilities that are much more like the desktop than the hypertext based web applications they are used to. One of the common user interface idioms supported by all of these technologies is what OpenLaszlo.org calls a "Cinematic User Experience(tm)". I think what this boils down to is that the former internet application model of "click, wait, blank during refresh, new screen" is replaced with a much smoother model where motion, fades, and other cues are used to keep the user aware of how things are changing in the current view. Simple yet compelling examples of these techniques can be found at OpenRico.org, a javascript technology that supports the ruby on rails platform.

The enabling technologies that support these smoother web application experiences are called, collectively, AJAX (asynchronous java and xml). Not all technologies use AJAX. Ruby on rails does. Laszlo and Macromedia Flex do not. The term AJAX was coined by Jesse James Garret of adaptivepath.com He describes the underlying technologies, innovative sites that are AJAX enabled, and some of the capabilities that the technology affords users. Some bloggers have warned that all this capability will just get interaction designers into trouble. The points are well taken and should be heeded. Like any disruptive technology, AJAX based models break the old model but offer new promises. In my early explorations with ruby on rails, one of the questions that pops into my mind is how are hyperlinks treated in this new idiom? The user interface is not about hypertext but people have a mental model of what links do.

One of the most useful aspects of the AJAX enabled models I've encountered (what shall we call them?) is keeping related things close. In hypertext based web applications, you typically need to navigate between related items keeping information in your head (or your cut and paste buffer). For example, a new alert might be received in a management application and you then need to find the related system and do some diagnosis. In a non-AJAX model, the data refresh will not be immediate so the new alert won't be immediately detected. Once the UI does update with the new information, you probably need to click a link and navigate to the related system. Every click will need to refresh the entire page, so interaction will not be as speedy as on the desktop. In an AJAX environment, only the necessary objects are refreshed, so interaction can feel much more immediate. Also, rather than clicking to navigate, a single screen experience can be supported where related items are on the same screen. Clicking the new alert in a table can cause the related system to be instantly highlighted. You can also drag-and-drop items onto receptive objects to create filters, graphs, etc. The single screen is also supported by many space-saving capabilities like accordion containers and other expandable widgets.

Done right, AJAX enabled web application UIs will enter a rich new era.

2005-08-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

Easier, simpler cell phones...

The Wall St. Journal ran an article today By DAVID PRINGLE that contained some interesting implications. What they noted was that older users didn't like the gadgets and gizmos on their phones. This is how the article starts:

At a time when cellphones are letting users do more tricks, from video calling to downloading digital music, one of the latest models from Vodafone Group PLC has no camera, no browser and hardly any icons. Instead of being sleeker and cooler than ever, the phone is large and ordinary-looking.
What it is, though, is easy to use, and if Vodafone is right, the market will love it. That's because of who its market is: people getting up in years.

If the battery on the Vodafone Simply, as it's called, gets low, the phone doesn't signal this with a tiny icon somewhere. Instead, on its screen, the words "please charge" appear. If a message is waiting, a light flashes, like in old-fashioned answering machines. To help people who tend to lose their phones around the house and let the battery run down, this one comes with a stand that serves as a place to stow the thing, and charges it while it's there.

What a concept... Some people just want the phone to ring.

I think this is useful to consider from an accessibility standpoint also. Some people, especially older folks, would buy more if it worked the way they need it to. They need large, clear displays with easy to understand instructions. Changes like this potentially open up a whole market of kids, older adults, people with disabilities.

2005-08-12T14:27:00.000-07:00

We are fairly new to the blog world, having only participated in a blog as contributors to another blog called ModusCooperandi, that we started with two colleagues, Jim Benson and Ken Thompson of Gray Hill Solutions. Actually, so far, Jim is the major contributor to ModusCooperandi, I think I'm in 2nd, Ken's in third and Jayson hasn't put a post in yet. Nonetheless, we liked the idea so much that we decided to enter the blogosphere here and see if we couldn't make enough content to interest outside folks.

At Quintus, we specialize in understanding how people think, most about technology. We take that information and translate it into interface designs for our clients, making them more "usable". We get to this grokking of how people think about technology through years and years (and years and years) of schooling in psychology, mostly in cognitive psych, and by working in some pretty big companies that get the notion that products have to work the way people expect them to work. (Smaller companies sometimes get this too, but not always.) And the annoying thing is that usability, as our largest area of work is referred to, is the kind of thing that you mostly don't notice unless it's not good. So we work with the companies who don't want to take that chance, and can't afford to wing it and hope that they think just like their customers think. A pretty big name in our field is Jakob Nielsen, a name a lot of people might recognize.

We also have a pretty deep understanding of accessibility and how to make technology work for people with disabilities. We don't build it, but we work with the people who do to help them understand what people with disabilities need to make technology work for them. For example, I have helped some big companies make their websites easier to use, cell phones work for people with disabilities and phone systems work for people who can't hear well.

I always try to keep up with the new tools out there to make technology work for people, like screen readers and other devices. This one is fun. A cool blog post on Smart Mobs I just got IM'd to me has an example of a new anti-tremor mouse called Mousecage.

And finally, Quintus knows about surveys, especially as a tool to help understand what customers are thinking. People think that online surveys are so easy--but then end up with data that they can't do anything with. We like to help companies understand what their customers are thinking in a way that they can DO something with the information. We're really excited about a new scorecard system we developed to help companies know how many people would promote them to others (Net Promoters--an article in the Harvard Business Review by
Frederick F. Reichheld called this The One Number You Need to Grow). You can check out our scorecard --it's interactive-- by going here. You have to have flash, and it's not all that accessible, so if you'd like to know more about an accessible scorecard, contact me.

Quintus Design

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

PRESS RELEASE IBM Contributes Open Source Code to Make FireFox Browser More Accessible

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