Recently in Usability / Design Category

I'm definitely liking the little transient prompts that Facebook is employing to educate people about their new interface. FB faces an interesting GUI problem in that they're a web site that has a user base ranging from first timers and very occasional users (both of whom see it as a "transient" application) and daily users for whom it's a "soverign" application that often stays open all day long. The prompts allow FB to make the new interface a little easier to learn, but once you acknowledge them, they don't show up any more.

This technique has been around in software applications for a long time, but you don't see it as often on web sites, perhaps because fewer sites ever make the transition to sovereign status, or because they do but are so simple it's unecessary (e.g. Twitter.)

This is the current status of the help window for Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac this morning. Look, I know sometimes web servers go down, SQL databases hiccup, etc. But really, couldn't you have a more graceful failure mode than this? Say, maybe, rolling back to good-old "offline" help pages?

Not a good outcome. And not helping me with my financial modeling.

(I was able to switch it to offline help manually... but how is a user supposed to know that?)

Wordle.net is a fun little Java utility that turns any block of text (or, as in the case above, my RSS feed) into a beautifully rendered word cloud. Lots of fun to play with and coincidentally adjacent to some work I've been doing lately with my new project (more on that later.) Wordle gives the best result if you tell it to block out common words in the language you're submitting (for English, "if, and, but... etc.").

[via The Morning News]

If you have a Facebook account you can go here to see the new profile page design. I understand what they're trying to do with it - focus folks on user activity rather than static profile boxes - but I think they're going to take a lot of flack for it.

It's very much like FriendFeed or Tumblr - which is great for people who spend all day posting little tidbits for everyone, etc. But a lot of Facebook users are much more casual net users who are using it as a substitute homepage. By removing all of the application boxes that users had been employing to customize their profile, Facebook is disrupting one of the reasons why it's become so popular.

I've always thought of FB as "blog light" - the next step in the evolution from HTML to MoveableType/Wordpress to Typepad and finally to Tumblr/Twitter. Each has respectively reduced the barriers to entry for users. FB takes it even further by basically bringing your real world friends right to your "blog", which is what most private individuals want anyway (you're not posting photos of kids for random Internet readers, you're posting them for Aunt Ida.)

Application developers are going to feel particularly slighted as well... their profile boxes, which users used to be able to place wherever they wanted on their profile page, have now been relegated to the "boxes" tab, a virtual interface ghetto. Facebook says this is because they wanted to isolate the sometimes unruly interfaces of 3rd party apps, but that's kind of a weak excuse -- after all, it was users choosing to put these applications into their profiles and use them, so obviously the interface issues weren't causing that many problems.

(Part of the lesson here is how difficult it is to remodel a product once it's released to the public. The people who have adopted it were the ones that liked how it was laid out, even if it wasn't optimal. Going to a new, better layout isn't always going to get the response you might expect, although sometimes it does.)

Update: It seems like different people see slightly different layouts in the new system, but there are similar comments regardless... as seen on another blog talking about the new UI.

So a few days after my post on the need to remake Windows from the ground up, this:

"Painfully visible are the inherent design deficiencies of a foundation that was never intended to support such weight. Windows seems to move an inch for every time that Mac OS X or Linux laps it.

The best solution to the multiple woes of Windows is starting over. Completely. Now."

NYT: Randal Strauss, "Why Windows Could Use a Rush of Fresh Air"

Forms are one of the tougher problems in web usability and something I've been thinking about lately. Here's a short list of some of the better resources I've found; some of them are older but the findings still apply. I'd have to assume users have gotten a little better at using forms over the past couple of years, but it also depends on how web-savvy the target audience is.

Getting a paper towel shouldn't require a numbered list...

I guess the idea of this is to reduce usage (it doesn't work - the machine doesn't dispense a long enough sheet on the first try, so you end up just repeating the procedure) but all it really does is add one extra tidbit of annoyance and cognitive load to everyone who ever uses it. There are definitely designs out there that do manage to do so, with less obstruction of the user. A good example of one design goal completely dominating the larger purpose of a device.

This could be used in the "what not to do" section of a user interface lecture. I'd bet that 95% of first-time users do what I did and press the green key (thereby cancelling their transaction) before realizing something's wrong and bending down to read the handwritten labels. What's worse, an ATM machine - where you're entering your banking info - is really the last place you want to encounter as slipshod a fix as this. One can only imagine how good their security is if this is the level of work on the part you can see...