A new talk from Al Gore about Climate Change has been posted on TED.com. As usual Al Gore does a great job at moving the audience and communicating a sense of urgency on the issue. The point he makes in his talk is: “Individual action is good, but it is not enough. The real answer is global regulations that will force governments, companies and people to change. There is no time for another approach.”

So, what can we do about it?… Well, my first step has been to take part in a petition locally in Hong Kong to pressure the government to put caps on carbon emissions from the two power companies on the territory. If you want to give a hand, just access the pre-formatted letter online and send it.

I have been a bad blogger! I started this post more than a week ago, and I only post it now… mea culpa!

Last week (two weeks ago now) we had another meeting with fellow IxDA members. This time we tried to set up a discussion instead of just socializing randomly and it seems that it went pretty well. We split the 8 people we had in two groups and chatted for a bit. The idea of the discussion was to cover the inputs, the process and the outputs that we use in our current design-related jobs.

While the first group of 4 people focused on specifics about the processes and the deliverables used, in the group I moderated we spent most of our time exchanging stories and discussing the environment and culture in which we work here in Hong Kong.

I especially like to discuss the Hong Kong user experience environment, because we are all struggling to get people to recognize our work here. Most stories practitioners exchange are about how difficult it is to get their manager or client understand the point of interaction design or usability. So the question is: “Is there any secret weapon to be successful in such an environment?”. Well, we are all still trying to figure it out, but let me try to summarize a few points:

Cultural Differences

The first very important criteria is culture. If you are working in a very “local” (meaning Chinese I guess) company, you will have a hard time. “Local” companies have a very top-down approach to work where subordinates do not ask questions, they execute. In this environment, designing interactions, which require developing a good understanding of users and business goals, is very difficult. A tip that some of the people in the discussion raised is to play on the lack of understanding of the people around you. Lack of understanding usually creates greater freedom; so just do your job as much as possible the way you think it should be done, choose your own deliverables and focus on showing the value of your work. Do not go head on fighting against corporate culture.

Take the Time to Educate

If your company has already some understanding of the issues, then continue to educate people around you. Involve them in decision-making. Make them feel like they are making decisions themselves based on your deliverables and inputs. Work on clear deliverables that other teams can use. Education is a very slow process and can be frustrating, but it can lead to great results and get people to really see the value of interaction design or usability. Integrating your deliverables in decision making is key there… after a while other teams will request for your deliverable to make decisions.

Be ready to become the “problem solver”

Starting to ask questions is dangerous. In some cases, once other people identify you as the critical mind of the company, everything will get thrown at you. Whenever a tricky decision has to be made, you will be requested to help. You will become the person who “thinks about stuff”. Be ready to take on that role for a while at least and face the consequences. Don’t forget along the way to protect yourself and involve others in decision making… or you will not last long.

Networking

Networking in critical in all areas of business and it is even more so in Asia. A good network within or outside an organization will greatly help. Most business deals here are made with people who “trust” each others, meaning have a personal relationship. Focus on keeping good relationship will make your work easier (and harder at the same time, see paragraph above).

Anyway. The conclusion is that there is no silver bullet to solve the usability/interaction design/user experience situation in Hong Kong. From the discussion we had, corporate culture is the main factor affecting all this. As long as companies do not care much about their customers and bosses are only interested in having their ideas implemented (regardless of business sense), interaction design will not flourish fully. Let’s hope the corporate climate continues to evolve in the right direction…

I guess Clifford Stoll is the most hyperactive human being on this planet. I found his talk about everything so good and inspiring. The thing that resonates the most to me is: “Think local, act local”. The world is so complex. If you try to reach too high you end up doing nothing. So just consider what is in front of you, make a small contribution and things are much easier in this way. And in the end you may contribute much more than if you try to reach for the stars.

Following my post on the article “Revenge of the Experts” in Newsweek two weeks ago I spent some time looking at their website. The overall look & feel of the website is very pleasant. It does the job. I find it makes the reader feel like reading their articles and highlights other stories pretty well, which a publication website is supposed to do. But wait! I am a Usability guy… Enough of being positive like that! I have to find errors, mistakes, areas for improvement, write a report, do recommendations, etc.

Luckily, I found something to criticize and something that allows me discussing a bit about interface controls, an issue people take too much for granted. When designing an interface, every time there is an interaction, you need to identify the best “control” to make this interaction happen. Should I use a button? Should I use a check box? A scroll bar? Build a navigation? Or just use a plain old link? The way I see this, making this decision is both a very rigorous process and also a highly contextual one. For every kind of interaction there is a set of appropriate controls that are more effective at enabling that interaction. Depending on the rest of the interface a specific control may also be much better than another one. That is if you are not the super control that can enable any kind of interactions! Yes, there is a perfect control out there that solves all problems and looks “cool” in your interface at the same time.

The magic word ladies and gentlemen is “sliders” . Yes, sliders. I remember not so long ago designing a form for one project and one of the stakeholders told me: “Optimize it for users, but… make sure there is a slider in there as well!”. Well, turns out, sliders are not that great at solving any interaction you have to design. That’s what I’d like to highlight in this post using Newsweek website as an example. Sliders on their article page are used in two places: first, as a way to change the font size on the interface, second, in a “widget” to control the date range to retrieve popular stories. In both instances, a different kind of control may have worked better.

Font size selection is for good reasons fast becoming a must have accessibility feature on text heavy websites. The task here is simple. A user finds the font is too small. The user could be a person with a partially impaired vision for example. In this case the website offers a way to increase the size of the text font. How well does this particular control address this issue? Well, not too well. First there is clear inadequacy between the control design and the task at hand. The task addresses the need of potentially visually impaired people, but the active part of the control (the small round cursor) is so small that even a person with no visual problem will have problems clicking on the right spot. Second, does the task require the user to select a value within a wide range of options (a task the slider is good at addressing)? No. The user just wants to increase the size of the font (or reduce it maybe) and see the result right away. In that sense, why use a slider? As an interaction designer I would stick to the good old “-” and “+” button here that are much better control to address the task at hand.

What about that second slider on the interface? Well, I would argue that it does a pretty bad job as well. In a “widget” in the right column of the website, a list of popular stories is highlighted. By default this list highlight the day’s popular stories, but users (via the slider) can select articles from a different date range. Again, different problems with this control. The first is in its design. It is usually advised to display values on a slider to let users know more about the range they are choosing from. Here, there is no way before interacting with the control to know in advance which value I will be able to choose.

The second is related to the task at hand. In this respect, I do not have enough experience with publication websites to know if my point is valid or not. I am wondering what kind of range people are interested in selecting when they are looking at the most popular stories. My guess is that today’s most popular stories is good enough for most readers, but if they want to change, why limit the user to 7 days max? (the case today on the website) And why letting users select a range like the last 4 days? Maybe user research actually showed this was right, but I am not convinced it is at this point. What of three buttons or a kind of navigation that says “today”, “last week”, “last month”? Would that be enough? I am not sure, but although the slider looks cooler, in the end users will care about efficiency and effectiveness, especially on a website like Newsweek.

Here is an article from Wharton “The Experts vs. the Amateurs” that is related to the article I posted about from Newsweek: “Revenge of the Experts” (my post here).

Despite its title, I think the most important issue raised in this latest article is the one about business models. With the “everything is free” idea going on (thank you Wired) everybody is running around trying to come up with an “hybrid business model”. Indeed, current free models offered by formerly paid publications are not sustainable as they don’t generate enough to cover for the loss of subscription money. So, is there an hybrid free business model? … I tend to think there is none. If you want quality, reviewed, edited content, … well it makes sense you have to pay for it somehow. And there is only so much advertising money can cover.

The big problem is that the line between Expert and Amateur content is very blurry as the article states, so it makes matters worse. What makes it even worse is that as human beings we are really bad at reacting to a situation until there is a big crisis. So, as long as old-fashioned professional publications survive, we won’t realize that we actually want to pay for quality content. Personally, I do a lot of consulting work, and I am happy people are actually willing to pay money for my work, instead of having to watch a 5 minute advertising video before every meeting they have with me. I can imagine it is the same for a reporter or an editor. My feeling is that paid publications will come back in the end… I can’t help but think that the whole “free” thing will quite quickly disappear… not that I am an expert on the issue in any way, just a thought.   :o)

Three types of projects
Just received Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox today. It is an interesting discussion on different design project types and the need for each of them to bridge the gap between the actual designer and the users. As interaction designer I consider myself mostly working on level 2 (the designer understands the product) and 3 (designing for a foreign domain) applications, rather than the level 1 (the designer is the user) type. That is, from my point of view. But I work with actual “designers” quite a bit who believe all projects are level 1 projects.

The important take-away from the article for me is the need at the beginning of a project to assess what is the knowledge level of the design team and plan for research as appropriate. If the design team is representative of the target users, then little research is required at the start, but usability testing is still a good way to fine-tune the design. On the other hand, if the design project is targeting a very niche user base, then user research is necessary from the start - before any actual design happens. It takes a lot of selflessness from the team to admit that their knowledge is limited on a topic and can be tricky as well when facing a client of some sort. That is the biggest barrier in that case. The fact that good design is a highly contextual matter is still not very well understood (at least in this part of the world).

Google Search usability test
The other interesting point in Jakob Nielsen alertbox is the test they did with Google Search showing that “only” 73% of users they interviewed managed to complete a Google search. Very striking statistics indeed! Google searching for people in the Web sphere is considered the most basic of tasks and should have success rates close to 99%. So what happens there… And if some people have a hard time completing that task, consider the complexity of the tasks on your website and ponder… how many users will actually complete this…

The end of user-generated content? Really?! With social networks, blogs, wikis and more new similar applications appearing every day, who would defend such an idea? It is at first glance what Newsweek seems to be doing with their article: “Revenge of the Experts” (found through Putting People First blog). But is it really what they are saying?

The debate is not really about whether user-generated content will disappear or not. People will continue to generate content. And with the increasing power of applications and tools we have within our grasp, we will continue to generate more and more content. But it is the role of this content that we generate that will be changing. With all the excitement brought by “Web 2.0″ (for lack of a better word) about common user doing the job of experts and companies using them to build a business model, we forgot that experts did not appear out of nowhere. Experts are here because, well, they are experts! They are much better at doing something than other people, and they should be rewarded for that. The tools that we now have available helped closing the gap between real expertise and perceived one, but the difference remains nevertheless.

The fact that blogs exist for example does not mean we can all be good reporters or journalists. It only means that we can all publish stuff. The fact that we can now comment on articles on most of the major magazines and newspapers, does not make us more expert than the person writing that article. And actually if we go beyond the facade of user-generated content, we discover that most content, as highlight in the article, is generated by a very small group of people. In the end, to create quality content to all can refer to, you need experts. Wikipedia just showed that an amazing tool could be created by offering a place where experts from a wide range of fields could aggregate all their knowledge, but it omitted to include a clear accountability review on the quality of each contributor.

In every such discussions I have these days everything boils down back to the word “good”. In the recent discussion on the use of personas, the conclusion basically is that if the person is “good” then personas are great. In this case it is the same. If a person is good, or an expert, then we can trust his or her judgment. This means that we need expertise, and we need ways to identify who has that expertise. After all the excitement, we could very well see more old fashioned business model that we thought were dead make a come back.

This is a concept video from Nokia. You can download it from Nokia’s website or watch it on YouTube (embedded below).

Concepts have been used a lot in the car industry to spur design ideas and creativity. I think this video does an amazing job at setting a vision for the future of mobile. It is crazy and … and a very long term vision. But it is also based on actual technology and actual constraints we have today with mobile devices (like features integration, screen size). Just like in the car industry where we don’t see concept cars in the street, there is very little chance we will see this concept out at all. Still, just like in the car industry, some of the features in these concepts can make it to the main stream products. I can’t wait personally how screen size limitations are addressed with new technologies… See Philips work… or Modu Mobile.

DISCLAIMER: I meant this post to be quite short… and I just realized I am writing more and more. As a result, the post covers stuff like information architecture as well… but maybe not in a way that is a thorough as it should be. I hope the result is still comprehensive enough…

The navigation is arguably the most important area in a website. From the navigation, the user should be able at a glance to create a mental model (definition on Wikipedia) of what the website is about and what it has to offer (be it content, services or products).

That’s where Information Architecture comes in. Information Architecture is basically two things: labeling and grouping information.

Labeling
Labeling seems straight-forward at first, but is a quite political issue. Good labeling should be clear and intuitive, meaning that when the user reads the name of a section, he or she should be able to guess what kind of content is included in it. The usual conflict when it comes to labeling is with the marketing department. In terms of branding and “sounding cool” many marketers come up with fancy names for sections they want on the website. Problem is,… these names require more effort on the user’s side to learn and thus affect usability. Not that they are always bad. If a “label” is consistently used throughout an organization regardless of the channel (online or offline), then it could work. As usual, the answer to that problem is: it depends on the context of use (like most usability problems).

An example with unclear naming… good or bad?!

Grouping
Grouping is the second aspect of information architecture. Grouping relates to how the content is put together to form sections, sub-sections, etc. Grouping is really key in supporting users in building their mental model of the website. A good grouping is hierarchical by nature and this hierarchy should be reflected in the navigation of the website. It is usually good to have a primary grouping where each piece of content resides in a single group and then if needed build multiple ways to navigate that information from different angles. Below screenshot shows this. On the International Herald Tribune, content is organized by topics first, but then it is also possible to browse according to location as well.

But that’s where the problems start (and where the actual blog post I meant to write start as well). The way the grouping on IHT is displayed really does not do a good job at helping users build a clear mental model. The design of the navigation creates the impression that regions (americas, europe,…) are subsections of the main iht.com section (that appears selected). That could work, but let’s look at what happens when we decide to look at business articles…

As the user is interacting with the navigation area, this same area should provide a feedback of the action that took place. Unfortunately at this stage, nothing happened. The homepage (iht.com) still looks selected, what looked like sub-sections (americas, europe,…) did not change. The mental model that users had build based the homepage does not hold anymore. Of course, the content below changed, and the page has a title “Business with Reuters”, but the job is not done. Users are also not given the opportunity to drill down more into sub-sections under business (possible at the bottom of the page), which I would say is a pretty important features.

Anyway. My post is pretty long already. To sum up: A navigation should support users in building a mental model of the website. That mental model should be reinforced as they browse to different pages. Easier said than done…

Experientia has posted a list of all the presentations made at the IxDA Interaction 08 conference with synopsis and videos. That’s a nice little source to spend rainy week-ends…

The first video I wanted to highlight is the one by Dan Brown about concept models (watch it on Brightcove or get the slides on Slideshare). That video had a big impact on me, as it made me basically put a name and reserve a space for an activity I was already performing in my projects. Without really making it formal I have been drawing concept models for most of my projects somewhere in between research (when we can actually perform any) and wireframing… or after… or at the same time…

That was the problem. Concept models had no timeframe and resources allocated to them, but somehow where necessary in order to formalize the solution that was being developed. From now on, I will dedicate specific time after research to working on these concept models whenever appropriate. I feel like a gap in my work process has been addressed here!

I have also started to read the book “Communicating Design” by Dan Brown. Although a bit too basic in some respect, it does a good job as a checklist to use during projects when you want to make sure you are on the right track and want to manage your project efficiently.