Everyday Tools for Usability and User Experience

Working on Usability and User Experience people know how important it is creating a website or an application that is usable and that at the end adds to your success.  There are tons of rules and guidelines available that one needs to follow when creating websites/applications in terms of layout, text, images... almost every element.   It's important to have the right tools at your mercy to ensure you give the right feedback to your customers.

Here are a few tools that I have been using extensively over the few years; some I Googled them up, some I found them on my RSS feeds and some of them recommendations.  All in all a bunch of important tools that makes my life easier.

Techsmith's Jing Project

Jing is a free software that adds visuals to your online conversations.  Allows you to catprue screen, screencasting and instant sharing.

Download Jing Project

Pencil Project

With the power of the underlying Mozilla Gecko engine, Pencil turns your excellent Firefox 3 browser into a sketching tool with just a 400-kilobyte installation package.  Pencil Project has built-in stencils for diagramming and prototyping, multi-page document with background page, on-screen text editing with rich text supports, PNG rasterizing, and much more.

Download Pencil Project


Notebook
In your notable world, you need to save your ideas, things you see, and things you like.  Paper & Pencil are your best buddies however you cannot carry them always everywhere...  Scanning them and keeping them would be another pain.  If you have the extra buck use Microsofts OneNote and if not use Evernote.


Download Evernote

Five Second Test
The Five Second Test is designed to help test the effectiveness of your site’s interface by exposing test subjects to it for 5 seconds. The test comes in 3 flavors:

Classic:  The classic five second test asks people to list the things they can recall after viewing your interface for five seconds.

Compare:  The comparison five second test asks people to choose their preferred interface after viewing each for two and a half seconds.

Sentiment: The sentiment five second test asks people to choose their most and least favourite elements after viewing your interface for five seconds.

Try FiveSecondTest.com for free

Click Heat | Clicks heatmap by Labs Media

While analyzing a website its important to know where the user is clicking and how much.  This information is of great help specially while designing retail websites.  ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones. ClickHeat is an OpenSource software, released under GPL licence, and free of charge

Get all the information that you are looking for on Click Heat.


Tools for Card Sorting

If you perform card sorting techniques frequently Optimal Sort is the right tool for you.  OptimalSort interprets and organizes information according to their own perspectives.  Seeing other perspectives can make us more effective.  This tools helps you gain new perspectives so that it becomes easier to find and use information on your website.

Create a free account with OptimalSort.

Mind maps

I find mind maps extremely helpful and useful.  FreeMind is a free software and is a very high productivity tool.  FreeMind helps me in a number of things like creating UX Flows, coming up with a feature list, prioritizing features and a whole lot of things.  The most important thing it gives  me direction.

Download FreeMind

Color Lovers

One of the most important tasks in usability or user experience is the colors and color combination that one uses for the website/application.  ColorLovers is a resource that monitors and influences color trends.  It gives people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design or in architectural specification.  A place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes and read color related articles and interviews.

Visit ColorLovers.com

Courier form Microsoft

Looks like the year 2010 is going to be year of the Tablet PC's. Here's a table from Microsoft codenamed Courier to compete with the much awaited Apple Tablet.

First impressions - Very Impressive!

Google Reader Explore

Came across an amazing feature today on Google Reader, guess a lot more fine tuning is required but its a step in the right direction.

click to view original size

The Explore feature on Google Reader shows me the most popular items from my subscribed feeds and also gives me a list of recommendations that I did be interested in.  Checking the all recommendations I find an interesting blog and subscribe to its feed right away.

And to my surprise, it was easy for me to use this feature, however took me a while to figure out what Popular Items is all about :)

Update Now, but How?

The moment I logged into twhirl (a tool to tweet on twitter), I get an update saying update to the latest version... but how?

I wasn't able to select twhirl in the list box or hit the Update Now button.  All I had to do is hit the Update Later and think how on earth do I update twhirl.

These are small usability issues that easily miss out during usability testing. Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust (PET) are critical factors for creating successful online interactions.

More on PET design to follow in my future posts.

Follow me on twitter!

Solutions for a better Interaction!

Came across an interesting video that examines the benefits and limitations in the current mouse-based windows-oriented interfaces.  Here is a solution proposed by 10GUI - some of the concepts here are amazing, however some of them I really have my doubts.

Enjoy the video!

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Did you personalize your application?

Personalization involves using technology to accommodate the differences between individuals. Applications are personalized based on the characteristics (interests, social category, context, etc) of an individual. (Wiki)

The concept of personalization when introduced took a while, but made a major impact in every industry. Today you find Websites, applications, devices, gadgets personalized. But the question still remains how easy are they to personalize. Today we see personalized dashboards (most common) or ways to configure your application, gadgets and websites to a certain extent which gives a feeling to the end user that yes its 'Personalized' for me.

But how easy it is to personalize? Applications today are personalized but to the extent where the Dashboard shows data that is relevant to you, allows to change shortcuts that is accepted by you, but what about personalizing the application to show data how and what you prefer easily?

Consider a scenario: Bruce (CEO) and Amanda (Sr. Manager) work for a retail company that deals in tools in Wisconsin Madison. Bruce started the company way back in 1985 with retail chains in 6 different states in the US. Later in 1996 he realized the power of the internet and started selling tools on ebay. Later in 2000, Bruce decided to go completely online with only one retail store in Madison. Amanda an MBA works closely with Bruce on maintaining the inventory to ensure they never run out of stock. Both of them have the same task - inventory forecasting and to do this they need multiple reports. So you build an application that gives them multiple reports in various formats - grids, graphs, pie charts and trend lines.

It looks simple when you build the application keeping Bruce and Amanda in mind since both of them want the same data. But what we miss at times is Bruce wants to look at data in a grid. Since his early years Bruce has been looking at inventory on print outs and excel. He is not comfortable with graphs and on the other hand, Amanda analyzes data based on graphs, she looks at bar graphs and trend lines extensively and for further details she takes a look at the data in the grid. So the application meets the requirements of both but both have to make an effort to get their data in respective formats on their screens.

This is where you would want to personalize. Allowing Bruce and Amanda to set their default views the very first time they access a report would be ideal. The moment they save their settings for a report they always open in the same view, with other options at low priority but still accessible.

It’s irritating rather confusing to show a list of massive settings and ask the user to personalize them even without showing them what the impact is.

Shake away the Clutter

I freaked out when I noticed a bug in Windows 7.  I called up my friend and showed him this and he too freaked out and he sent out an email to Microsoft explaining the bug.  Well, to our amazement, Microsoft came back to us saying its a feature and not a bug.  Interesting, I gave it a though and maybe the way I discovered this feature made me to lead that its a bug.

My bluetooth mouse wasn't functioning well and every now and then it kept hanging.  So in frustration I just shook the mouse and noticed that the window that I had selected remained open and the other windows just fell off and minimized.

Well now Microsoft calls this a feature - well its going to be extremely difficult for people to discover this feature specially for those who have never used a Mac or unless someone gets frustrated with their bluetooth mouse and discovers it like how I did.  However the question for Microsoft still remains on the discover-ability of this feature.

Well I should have guessed, here is Microsoft's answer "Shake away the Clutter"

Is Feature Prioritization a priority?

Any product/project development has a set of features that has to be developed at the end of the day. It is important to have the list/set of features however it isn’t a priority to prioritize them. This is a mistake that a lot of Business Analyst and Product Managers run into… for simple reason because its risk free. At the end one can blame it to the customer since the customer was the one who wanted the features.

One needs to understand what features need to be added to a product to meet customer needs by not prioritizing the features but to have a much broader view. One needs to know the underlying customer needs to the business model to the product road map to the go-to-market strategy. The ultimate goal for a product manager or business analyst should be Return on Investment.

Unfortunately, it is all too easy for product managers and business analyst today to fall into feature-focused development mode, especially for web applications and those developed using Agile methods.

A simple exercise can prevent help one break a trap. Ask yourself the age old and basic questions repeated time and again

1. What is the purpose?
2. What problem does it solve?
3. Who is my target Customer/Persona?
4. What are the alternatives to solve this problem?
5. How important it is to solve this problem?
6. Does this support the product strategy and roadmap?

It is easy and tempting to prioritize features and get the work done with a few extensions to your deadline; however it is important to identify the right feature to have a better Return on Investment.

Usability Tips - Your Home page

Home page is an organisation's face as many would have quoted and should have the most important information or let me stress once again MOST IMPORTANT information and not all the information. The home page needs to strike a blance between showing the range of information and simplifying the content to ensure that the majority of customers can easily embark on the most common tasks.

We all have guidelines and standards, however some of the things that you could keep in mind while making a wacky and impressive home page:

• Clearly focused user's tasks
• Too much content in your site - provide a search
• Provide CLEAR and visible navigation
• Make sure the Navigation is ordered logically or in a task oriented manner
• Navigation should match your design of the home page. Too much of jazz in your navigation is mistaken for advertisements.
• Useful and most important information should be available form the home page in a click
• Make sure your link in the home page have the most important keywords in the begining

So go ahead, get CREATIVE with your home page designs and keep these few pointers while you design your website.  

"If you find a home page interesting post it here in the comments section!"

Focus Groups

Back on my UX blog! Have been tied up with work and was on a hunt to name my blog!

Continuing where I left last time... Focus Groups

Wikipedia Definition of a Focus Group - "A focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their attitude towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea or packaging.  Questions are asked in an interactive group setting where participants are free to talk with other group members."

This doesn't mean that you critic the product/service/concept/advertisement/idea/packaging to the extent that it means whatever is presented is utter crap!

Its important that you go well prepared for the session before hand:

1. Identify the objective(s) of the meeting
2. Develop relevant questions for the session
3. Plan your session well
   
4. Invite potential members for the meeting
5. Most important or all send out an reminder about 3 days before the session

Remember, the major goal of the focus group session is to gather useful information.  So, introduce yourself, explain the means to record the session, carefully word each question and after the question has been answered summarize of what you have heard and most important ensure even participation.

Make notes, drawings, sketches of your observations for your future reference.