The UKUPA is the UKChapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association. It brings together UK professionals from the design, technology and research communities who share a vision of creating compelling technology that meets users’ needs and abilities.
Once a month they hold events and Bunnyfoot had the pleasure of sponsoring the July event on the theme of UX and ROI.
We had a guest speaker come in to talk to my Brownie Guide group on Monday for their Disability Awareness Badge. In a wheelchair at 21, Anne has gone on to become a successful solicitor who has sailed the Atlantic well before the internet was established. But Anne has offered me a view about how making experiences amazing, beyond simply functional, is the key to her living her life to the full.
We talked about Christmas shopping, working from home, sources of information to improve life with a disability and how charities are behind the times with technology. Nowadays, with the technology available, Anne can be just as able as I am, but she is also more bound to using it than I am. Focussing on just Christmas shopping, this is when it really drills home that when you make an effort to make an experience amazing for your customer, for some you are massively enhancing the quality of their life.
11th November 2010 saw World Usability Day being celebrated around the world. We took part by hosting a design competition on World Usability Day’s theme of “Communication”. We had an amazing morning with the kids from Royal Mile and Niddrie Mill primary schools. In the last month they have built their prototypes following user centred design principles, and after a round of testing at the Bunnyfoot offices they have made all their changes and were ready to put their ideas to a panel of judges.
Prizes up for grabs were:
Best Presentation, Most Usable Device, Most Innovative Device and Most Realistic Prototype.
This week, we’ve been overrun with 10-11 year olds from Royal Mile and Long Niddrie Mill primary schools, showing us up with their amazing ideas for how to improve communication in their schools for World Usability Day.
We’re hoping to teach them that usability is a key element when designing tools for communication by helping them to test their products in a professional environment. Each team appointed a moderator, then watched from the viewing room as a group tested their prototypes. Read the rest of this entry »
On the whole, humans are visual creatures, which makes sense when you think about it as sight allows us to perceive, identify, and act on objects outside of our reach. As such, many designers go to great lengths to attract customers by designing displays that are visually appealing. However, if you only consider vision, a number of interaction opportunities to make interesting, impacting and memorable designs slip through our fingers.
Today the UK Drivers Standards Agency (DSA) announced that there will be a new ‘independent’ driving section of the driving test. This will be 10 minutes in the driving test where the test candidate will NOT receive step-by-step instructions from the examiner, but will rather be expected to drive unsupervised and without prompting.
Road safety minister Mike Penning said: “the independent driving assessment gave test candidates the chance to show they have the “necessary skills to cope with the sort of traffic conditions they will face every day”.
Making it real is a good thing!
A good move we think – in testing anything, whether it’s a person’s skills or the usability of a website, it is important to make the test as close to reality as possible (some term this ‘ecological validity’ we just say ‘making it real’). When we do lab based usability testing or testing in the field we always strive to make it as natural as possible, and amongst other things this includes avoiding giving prompts or directions and just letting the person get on with what they were doing without interruption.
How far will they go in making it real?
The driving test candidates won’t be penalised for getting lost and can ask for help with directions if they wish – they are being examined not on their navigation (thank goodness otherwise I know many people who would never pass) but how they drive by themselves. It will be interesting to see how far the examiners will go in making the testing more realistic – for instance will they allow sat navs? - if so, would the candidates be penalised for swearing at them (as often seems to happen somehow in my car)? And what about screaming kids, and argumentative spouses….?
One of the great attractions in Edinburgh is the Zoo, my kids love it. We have been members for five years and spend many days of the summer holidays wandering around. Over the last few years I’ve seen the Zoo marketing develop and on my last visit was particularly impressed by their recent flyers. They have successfully combined maps, plans for the future, members information and all manner of other info into one neat, slick and usable handout.
The flyer is a standard DL sized concertina folded affair but what nicely sets it apart is that it has a built in information architecture and is really easy to use.
The concertina has an offset fold that exposes a small border. The borders show the title of that section and make it easy to find and fold to that section. The borders act in the same way as tabs do within a webpage. They conceal a large amount of information in a small space and provide the user with a quick introduction to the contents.
Having these tabs makes it easy to find the section you are interested in and avoids the problem of either having to open up the entire concertina or folding it up in some weird way to expose the bit that you are interested in.
If the zoo were not a fantastic trip in and of itself, I would heartily recommend popping along just to pick up one of these flyers.
If you’re aware of any similar excellent examples we’d love to hear about them.
Well, we asked for some snow donations on Twitter and they came in in abundance! One day there was not even a hint of frost and the next, we were ankle deep in snow, working from home, but still managing to inject some Bunnyfoot fun into the day with a “usability snowman” competition across our UK offices (I hope Hong Kong don’t feel too left out!).
2 hours, some snow and a little imagination produced an outright winner from Oxford’s Usability Consultant, Nick Antram. Here’s his entry…
Here is an attempt at a usable snowman. We talked to local snowmen users and asked them what they really wanted out of their snowmen and the overwhelming response of the 2 people we spoke to was that snowmen needed to be not only big fat piles of snow that were funny to look at, but useful too!
Popular suggestions were:
To have a flashing light on the top so users could easily see the snowman in a snowstorm
Have a comfy seat to allow users to have a nice sit down after struggling through the snow
To have a nice cuppa tea (when is this not a popular suggestion?)
So we sketched some ideas:
Well ok, just one
Initial sketches of a usable snowman
Did some anthropometric analysis and fitting trials:
Scientific sketches to make sure the snowman chair is viable
Which gave us the 95th percentile of users
Then we user tested it thoroughly in blizzard like conditions **
And this is the result…
The snowmatic ergsnowchair!
Snowman Chair in its completed form
With some final user testing, we just knew it was perfect.
In 2005, here at Bunnyfoot, we carried out an eye tracking usability study; it showed that 79% of people were able to find the 2003 UK gross domestic product using Google.
We carried out a similar eyetracking study in May 2009 using Bunnyfoot’s Mass User Testing approach and found that this had dropped to 37%.
We also compared the performance of Google to the new WolframAlpha search engine where 100% of people got the correct answer. This result is worrying for Google for two reasons:
Google’s algorithms have got better in the intervening years; despite there being significantly more pages indexed on Google in 2009 compared to 2005 Google returns fewer results for the same search string; “gross domestic product UK 2003”. Given more pages to return results from and better algorithms it ‘should’ be easier to find information, not harder.
The general level of people’s Internet experience and expertise has increased since the original study – people ‘should’ be more successful, not less.
WolframAlpha also outperforms Google on three key measures of usability; effectiveness and efficiency and satisfaction. However, the strength of the Google brand dominated WolframAlpha with 100% of users saying that they would recommend using Google to a friend with only 77% saying they would recommend WolframAlpha.
The study is by no means comprehensive; it is based on a single search query and one that favours WolframAlpha’s approach to knowledge management/search, but is does pose an interesting question:
Can Google’s search dominance be beaten by better results and usability or is the brand so strong that people will stay loyal no matter how good the competition gets?
The BBC news item below shows a report on the UK’s first Internet enabled car – produced and invented by Bunnyfoot in 1999. The car was intended as a demonstration of the essential importance of usability and accessibility … our message got somehow lost in translation in the newspapers and TV shows that ran the story, but it taught us a lot about different communication methods and to always look to the future.
Since then (is it really 10 years ago?) we have produced hundreds of video demonstrations showing usability testing, eyetracking and accessibility in action, our customer experience presentations at seminars and conferences etc, and many will be appearing here in the next few months – but this BBC one was one of our first … and is still a firm favourite.
What is perhaps surprising is that this type of technology and other ‘alternative interfaces’ haven’t really come on that far in the last 10 years- it seemed then (in 1999) that things like sophisticated voice interfaces for all sorts of devices and uses were bubbling just under the surface. In 2009 though you are likely to be annoyed at best, but most probably bemused, by the majority of telephone interfaces (has anyone tried Egg’s?), never mind anything more ambitious. It seems like it should be simple but this type of interface requires just as much research and careful design (perhaps more) than seemingly more complex visual interfaces. I’ll return to discuss this in more detail in a future post.
The point of the Bunnymobile video?
It was meant to demonstrate that usability and accessibility are vital for the interfaces of the future:
the car used software that blind people use to translate web sites into voice = accessibility
and needed to be simple enough so distraction didn’t cause you to crash (amongst other things) = usability
It seems we were right, and they still are important … lots more challenging and interesting work to do though.
They conceal a large amount of information in a small space and provide the user with a quick introduction to the contents.
