19 Feb 2007 0831H

UX news this morning

There’s a lot of tripe out there about user experience which doesn’t get at the heart of the problem, as when I read people, usually techies and designers, writing about RIAs — “gives you a richer user experience,” which means, what exactly? Flashier graphics, transitions, gee whiz zoom bang type effects and all the stuff that tanked Flash as a frivolous platform not tied to performance metrics, taking the web industry down with it the first time around? I keep wanting to quote Inigo Montoya from the Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” But there is some pretty interesting stuff on occasion.

Great summary of agile methods in the UX workflow from Dave Churchville, simple, succinct, direct and fresh.

UK music executives are aware that the mobile user experience is bad as a delivery platform for music downloads. Well, that’s a start. All they need to do now hire people to figure out what’s wrong and fix it. Maybe they’ll issue a press release about that next decade. . .

In fact, the CMO Council’s Forum to Advance the Mobile Experience (Jeez. Who’s the marketing genius who came up with that?) lends some insights here. A survey of 15,000 users in 37 countries reveals too many functions they do not use is the number one problem self-reported about mobile devices. Irony: most of those functions came from marketing.

The Market Metrix Hospitality Index, a survey of 35,000 customer interviews, shows that over 50% of users are booking directly from the website of a hotel or a brand (like, say, Starwood), with the remainder divided up among the various online discounters. That’s pretty surprising. They also say that the best performing website per their idea of user experience was Drury Inns, although it’s not performing too well right now, probably got slashdotted. Edit: DruryInns.com, you would think, is the logical URL for that site. It ain’t. It’s actually DruryHotels.com. Well, that don’t make a licka sense, ’specially if the number is 1800DruryInn. Which also doesn’t make sense since there’s too many letters. Oh well. Don’t think too hard about it, you’ll only hurt yourself. . .

I like that this guy is interviewing user experience officers at Google and Yahoo about their search engine site user experience. This is great. We often don’t talk with each other, perhaps out of busy-ness, perhaps out of fear that our “secrets” will be taken from us. When you observe people like Lou Rosenfeld, you’ll note that he considers IA to be a kind of social activity, that it is meant to be practiced, as an UCD method should be really, socially.

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