That's quality man.

Zip Car

This is nice. Instead of just a video still, the designers of this site took the opportunity to tell us a little about the video and encourage us to press play. This is a good example of staying on our game, little things like this can go a long way towards accomplishing our strategic goals but opportunities like this can be easy to miss when we are working on larger layout, architecture and interaction parts of the site.

I like that the message sets your expectations for what you are about to see. I would speculate that the quality of the view is much greater if you are prepared or already feeling engaged when you start the video. I also like that the real estate taken up by video player adds some value even if you don't want to watch the video. Just reading the message relays information and strengths brand perception.

Quality of the view is an important metric to measure. The definition will vary depending on the purpose of the video, but understanding what a quality or successful view is, is an important step in creating the interaction and even the content of the video.

Is it successful if they watch 50%? 20%? Turn up the volume? Send to a friend? Watch more than once? Only watch the first 10 seconds but then navigate to exactly the right place in the conversion funnel? Is it a less than quality view if, they finish it then leave the site? Send it to a friend but as a joke? Navigate to a page that takes them further from conversion?

Just something to think about.

Space: What's it doing to your research?

There is a nice article over at Scientific America about how humans interact with and react to the build environment. I thought it was a nice reminder of for those of us who spend our days designing digital environments that what we create, though not wood and drywall are spaces that people spend time in but what I found really interesting was on of the experiments they discus.

" In 2007 Joan Meyers-Levy, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota, reported that the height of a room’s ceiling affects how people think. She randomly assigned 100 people to a room with either an eight- or 10-foot ceiling and asked participants to group sports from a 10-item list into categories of their own choice. The people who completed the task in the room with taller ceilings came up with more abstract categories, such as “challenging” sports or sports they would like to play, than did those in rooms with shorter ceilings, who offered more concrete groupings, such as the number of participants on a team. Because her earlier work had indicated that elevated ceilings make people feel physically less constrained, the investigator posits that higher ceilings encourage people to think more freely, which may lead them to make more abstract connections. The sense of confinement prompted by low ceilings, on the other hand, may inspire a more detailed, statistical outlook—which might be preferable under some circumstances"

Wow. I'm pretty cognizant of the impact of environment on how you feel and your ability to think. Personally I'm extremely effected by it, I've even had to leave a couple jobs due to the environment. Reading this article has me thinking about the research I have conducted and how I will conduct it in the future. I also love that they use a card sort! (great validation for the method).

futureshape

Here are some thoughts:

1. Is it possible that the answers a user gives in the lab could differ enough from the answers they would give at home in front of their own computers, as to make the data false or at least misleading? I'm not just thinking about the difference between ethnographic or contextual inquiry research, I'm thinking about the lab experience might actually change the way people think they think about something. Just as the tall ceiling affected the subject of this research.

2. How does the experience of conducting an interview over the phone effect the data. When you are on a call your mind almost creates a "mental room" that that the conversation is happening in. If the connection is bad, the volume is uncomfortable or the voice of the interviewer reminds you of someone you know, the environment of that call could effect the data. As a researcher over the phone you have no way to know what the interviewee is experiencing so you can't help to adjust the environment.

Full disclosure on this thought: I'm not really a fan of the phone interview, so I'd selfishly like to learn anything that could help me convince stakeholders to spend money on in person research.

3. All of the research labs I have seen have a similar layout and feel. What if this typical research environment has been effecting the results of research in a particular way all this time. What if sitting in a room with a one-way mirror causes you to answer questions with less intensity then you actually feel or causes you to prefer blue over green? Hummm....

North

We All Need a Window Seat!

This isn't particular to UX but a great topic to bring up when selecting a new location for your office or are planing to rearrange or remodel your current space.

"In addition to ceiling height, the view afforded by a building may influence intellect—in particular, an occupant’s ability to concentrate. Although gazing out a window suggests distraction, it turns out that views of natural settings, such as a garden, field or forest, actually improve focus." "They found that kids who experienced the greatest increase in greenness as a result of the move also made the most gains on a standard test of attention." "In their analysis of more than 10,000 fifth-grade students in 71 Georgia elementary schools, Tanner and his colleagues found that students in classrooms with unrestricted views of at least 50 feet outside the window, including gardens, mountains and other natural elements, had higher scores on tests of vocabulary, language arts and math than did students without such expansive vistas or whose classrooms primarily overlooked roads, parking lots and other urban fixtures."

This stuff just gets me going. I believe we all deserve a nourishing environment to spend our time in, whether we understand or realize the impact or not, but unfortunately many people aren't as lucky as many of us in our beautiful agency offices. This may have to be my next philanthropic project.....


Go read the whole article, I'm sure you will find ten other points that could be applied to our work. I'd love to hear them:)

Only when you need it

We are all trying to create something that will be used and the path to this sucess is designing for a particular group of people.

It isn't just about solving a particular PROBLEM or coming up with a particular IDEA.

Only when you match a PROBLEM with a PERSON or an IDEA with a PERSON are you at the place where you can start making design decisions.

There's always more than one way to do something and what validates one choice over the other is if it's the best choice for someone specific (this often means a group of someones)

This example is super simple (maybe too simple) but it expressed my point.

This site has a main navigation just like most sites because like most sites it needs to solve the problem of getting peeps to some major chunks of content so they may interact with it. They also have an idea (to share information about the company)....

but where is the Navigation? If this was a store or a bank site we would have a problem. But it isn't a store or bank. It's a creative company that is hoping to attract companies who are ready to engage the creative process to improve their businesses.

These people don't have the same needs. There is no need for a persistent, in your face navigation. They will enjoy the page and then when ready roll over the little box, expose the navigation and choose another topic to explore. They are willing to discover and uncover (woo, i like that)

I'm just a fan of the O.W.N (only when necessary) approach to design (yes, I just made that up) Not everything needs to be shoved in our faces, and for some PROBLEM + PERSON combinations, the more standard, blatant approach is the wrong one.

Screenshots are from MilkShake , who you already know I *heart*

Natural mapping - Noah Iliinsky

I'd like to start sharing interesting articles and blog posts, but I don't necessarily need to comment on them except to say, "Nice thinking" So this is my new format. Click the image to read the full text.

too simple means too hard.....sometimes.

i've always been bothered by the overly "simple" ipod interface. it seems to just slow me down and leave me longing for new features.

Terry Bleizeffer of The User Experience Soap Box, found this problem in another household item.

"By having a single button, they didn't make it simpler, they made it more complex. They didn't simplify the feature set, only the interface, by overloading their single button with a bunch of different capabilities." read the full entry, Faux Simplicity

why

why the pillow?

• i need a place to log the ideas and thoughts i get while falling a sleep. i get some really good ideas when my head is on a pillow.
  
• much of the content here maybe fluff.
• it could be a metaphor for a good user experience. i'll have to write about that later and it might be fluff.

why a blog ?

• people are writing and talking about user experience stuff all over the place and i need a place to log these conversations. i thought others might like to see my list of articles and links.
• blogs are a good way to meet people and i am trying to meet fellow industry people in Portland Oregon, where i just moved this summer. hi!