Archive for February 2007

16 Feb 2007 1012H

Multivariate analysis in user interface testing

I’ve learned recently that we now have the capability at Brulant to conduct not only A/B split testing, but multivariate analysis on user interfaces as well. This is a huge capability, and pretty interesting stuff. To begin with, let’s step back into algebra a bit. Everyone’s familiar that in science, we’re trying to observe the [...]

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14 Feb 2007 1327H

Yes, it’s IA learnings for VD

Is there a day without user experience learnings in information architecture, interaction design, or usability? Not when there’s money to be made, there’s not! Today we turn our attention to the very timely 1800Flowers.com (or “flahrs,” as I like to say) and FTD.com, which has some common user experience issues in its checkout section. Shall [...]

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13 Feb 2007 1130H

Consumer Reports on Rear View Camera Interface

See, it really isn’t rocket surgery. People know what they want and they don’t care how hard it is to do, you better make it happen. Instead, we are left to ask, why doesn’t the rear view camera on the Audi Q7 engage automatically when you engage Reverse? And the ingenuity of the device is [...]

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13 Feb 2007 1111H

Usability, prototyping, requirements gathering lifecycle

We have a major snowstorm today and it’s bad, hella bad out. Don’t know if I can make it out today. Getting cabin fever. So I’m going to rant here.
I hate JAD sessions! Sitting hours after hours in stuffy dim conference rooms, lit mostly by blueish LCD projector light. Bah! It’s a very heavyweight methodology [...]

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12 Feb 2007 0812H

Pixel prototyping

Ran a pixel prototype in Adobe Illustrator off my laptop last night with two subjects, swapping out layers, shuffling things around. If I had two screens, one to hold UI widgets and elements and the other to do presentation that would have made the illusion more complete, I think, but, the prototype technique still worked. [...]

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10 Feb 2007 1336H

Feedforward, Affordances, Conventions, Design Elegance

Am looking for an AJAX UI widget that allows the user to scroll content horizontally like the widgets on the iTunes Music Store. Failing that, might code it myself. I’m reading through the contents of the Yahoo UI Library (YUI) and am pretty impressed by how well organized and very well documented it is; makes [...]

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08 Feb 2007 1326H

Barry Schwartz, Jenifer Tidwell, and what they taught me about IxD today

I have two learnings to pass on about User Interface Design today. They’re so important I even init-capped User Interface Design.
The first comes from Barry Schwartz’s book on satisfaction, choice, and consumer behavior, The Paradox of Choice. In it, he talks about opportunity costs, which the Economist succinctly describes as, “the true cost of [...]

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08 Feb 2007 0939H

In re Shopping Bag aka Bag v. Shopping Cart aka Cart, et al.

Flaunting nearly a decade of convention and training of millions of users to align around the term shopping cart, retailers among the fashion industry are now secretly trying to subvert this practice and replace the hard-won “cart” with the disparaged “shopping bag.” They cannot be allowed to succeed. Dispatch user experience agents into the field [...]

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02 Feb 2007 1133H

Gap’s QuickLook, and why it works

Been doing a lot of Chinese American/Canadian stuff lately, so I’m going to go back to UE/UX/whatever the hell are we calling it this week for a second.
A lot’s been made of this Gap QuickLook AJAX UI technique recently, I’ve been trying to incorporate it as well in my work for a client recently, [...]

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