Last night my mom needed to buy a ticket for my 17-year-old brother to fly from Minneapolis back to San Francisco where they live. I was on the phone with her twice, walking her through the United Airlines website for over 20 minutes each time. This is unacceptable. My mother, who is 55, isn’t very computer savvy but she does own a computer with an Internet connection, has taken programming classes, has done online dating, and has even managed to book a ticket on Orbitz once… maybe twice.
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Posts Tagged ‘User Experience’
United Airlines and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Experience
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011The Most Dangerous Game
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011This month marked another milestone in game show history. On February 14-16, Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter defended their trivial supremacy against Watson, a computer program created by IBM. Drawing on vast stores of information and a complex algorithm for selecting the most probable answer, Watson all but ran the board on its way to a $1 million prize for IBM, which the company pledged to donate to charity. Yet the hype around Watson’s victory obscured a more important contest—that between humans and our ability to understand our own technology—and we’re not doing so well in that one, either. (more…)
Does your website legally need to be accessible?
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010The other day I was asked the question “To what level does any website legally need to be made accessible?”
“The influence of web accessibility on business and industry is more significant when the demands of a client, or potential client, like the US federal government, must be met.” (WebAim.org)
The law that exists today says that if you are the federal government or supply electronic and information technology goods and services to the federal government, then yes, you must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (Section 508 Standards). This law requires “Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology (EIT) accessible to people with disabilities.” (section508.gov)
Insecure Footing: How Bad Usability Endangers Internet Users
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010How do you communicate danger to people who don’t speak your language? How do you not only alert them, but give them enough information to act even though you will never meet face-to-face? These questions were behind an effort to design a warning for the proposed nuclear waste storage facility inside Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, and they’re similar to the ones you face when trying to design for user security online.
In 2003, the Desert Space Foundation, a Nevada arts organization, hosted an exhibition that showcased novel ideas for a warning sign that would retain both its meaning and its structural integrity for the 10,000 years that Yucca Mountain was projected to pose a hazard. The difficulty of the task manifested itself in the variety of entries. Several artists assumed that familiar symbols like the yellow and black radiation icon would carry the scent of danger across the divide, but not everyone agreed, according to a Los Angeles Times article at the time.
The risk of radiation burns is lower for Internet users (especially with modern LCD monitors), but being online can be dangerous all the same. The recipients of the communication are separated not by time but by their lack of technical expertise. However, the complexity of the threat and the jargon used to describe it is at least as opaque to many people as ancient pictograms can be to us.
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Where business analysis and user experience intersect: the benefits of collaboration
Monday, July 12th, 2010According to Harvard Business Review editor Julia Kirby, 2010 may be the year for a resurgence in companies reconnecting with their users and focusing on user experience, but don’t forget about business analysis! It’s the BA’s job to ensure that the issues and business objectives are understood. When the solution involves end users (of a new or enhanced application/website/product), that’s where we need team up with a user experience (UX) professional.
Five Web Analytics Metrics for User Experience Professionals
Thursday, April 29th, 2010My name is Andrew Janis, and you haven’t seen me in this space before because I’m usually wearing the marketing hat at Evantage. That often means I’m knee deep in marketing analytics and occasionally working with someone on our UX team to analyze usability test results in the context of real-world behavior.
Prototyping iPad Optimized Websites Using Axure
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010I have been tasked with creating an Axure prototype that will be demonstrated on an iPad. I’ve seen the iPad, played with the iPad, but this is first time I will be creating a prototype to be displayed on the iPad.
The first question I had was, “How will I get the Axure prototype onto the iPad? Is there an app for that? “
User Experience Design Career Development – Part 1: A Formal Career Path
Monday, February 15th, 2010User experience (UX) design has a reputation for being both hard to get into and hard to progress from. I talked about how to get into UX design in my last article, so now I want to talk about where you go once you get in. In some ways, this is actually a harder problem. There are books that introduce you to UX design but none that really show you how to branch out once you’ve established yourself as a UX designer. Fortunately, I work at Evantage, where in 2006 Mary Donnelly and I helped management and HR to define a comprehensive UX design career path. I’m going to share it with you here and then discuss some other options to consider in a follow-up article. (more…)
Does Your Website Really Need a Mobile App?
Thursday, January 21st, 2010Word on the street is that if you have a great site you should create a mobile app. I’ve been hearing it a lot from clients lately that everybody is on their phone and “if users could access our information then our product will be more valuable.” Is this just a fad or is it valid? Well, that depends on your customers and your business goals. (more…)
2010 Conferences
Monday, January 18th, 2010It’s a new year. Time to start thinking about what conferences to attend in 2010. The following is a list of conferences we at Evantage are likely to attend (or have attended in the past) due to their content and location. This is not a comprehensive list. There are some conferences such as IDEA that I would recommend but they do not currently have information listed about a 2010 conference. Likewise, the Usability Professional Association annual conference is another one I would typically recommend, but due to its location in Munich, Germany this year, it doesn’t appear feasible (unless you have the travel budget). (more…)
Sustainability and User Experience Join Together for World Usability Day
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009This Thursday marks the fourth year of World Usability Day. Held the second Thursday of November every year, it is an event that celebrates the design around us that makes our lives easier. This year’s focus on sustainability and design.
Having always been an environmental geek, the theme of this year’s World Usability Day is especially important to me. Sustainability and creative reuse has been a focus of mine since I was in an organization lobbying for recycling containers in high school. I’ve always focused on how daily actions can affect the Earth. I was one of the few people who used her palm pilot to store directions to friend’s homes and measurements for an ottoman I was building because I did not want to waste paper. My current phone maps directions, stores measurements and even lets me check in for a flight without the hassle and guilt of paper. Not only does this design create less waste, it also makes me more organized.
The last few years has seen a greater consciousness in how we treat the world and how thoughtful design of systems and products can improve someone’s day. Instead of jumping into design, we take a moment to study how people use existing technology and how they live their lives or do their jobs and then make recommendations for the systems and products they use. This may result in a higher initial cost, but the benefit is a long term savings that resounds with many people in this economy. I realize that this doesn’t work for everyone. For example, my brother isn’t an eco freak like myself, but he loves smaller energy bills and I love that he makes less of an impact on the Earth.
Join the discussion of this year’s celebration. UPA chapters around the world have events focusing on sustainability and user experience. Find your local chapter event.
Playfulness, Usability, & Context: The Three Pillars of a Delightful User Experience
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009When I bought my first iPhone almost three months ago, I also acquired a new obsession with the role of playfulness in user experience design. Recently, a fortunate coincidence occurred that has allowed me to explore this new obsession deeply. Two iPhone developers each released new measurement unit conversion apps within a week of each other and also documented their design processes on the Web. As if that weren’t enough, both of these applications, taptaptap’s Convert and Tapbots’ Convertbot, were designed with the idea of delightful experience in mind. The two apps are very different despite all these similarities, and those differences got me thinking about the relationship between playfulness and usability in creating delightful interactions. I succumbed fully to my obsession and roped in some iPhone-using coworkers to participate in an informal comparative usability test. What I learned, led me to compelling insights about the relationship between usability and playfulness.
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A Few of My Favorite Things About Axure
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009Working on a clickable prototype in the last couple of weeks I am reminded again of how much I can do in Axure that I couldn’t do in Visio. User Experience Design is all about context and while I know I got a lot of great information using paper prototypes, there is another layer of learning I’ve achieved by allowing these users to personalize their experience using a clickable prototype based on where they navigate and what they enter and displaying that information back to them. (more…)
Six Data Points for User Research Documentation
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009As a user experience consultant, I spend a fair amount of time at the beginning of a project reading existing user research reports. These reports help me understand the user research done in the past, the outcome and what, if anything was identified for further exploration. For small and relatively simple projects these reports are fairly easy to thread together. But for large and more complex projects that involve multiple user experience professionals conducting user experience activities in parallel, tracing the user research history just six months after the project is complicated and can sometimes be challenging.
Here are the six data points that I think every user research report must include.
A look at Healthcare Systems and Web 2.0
Friday, May 22nd, 2009Recently I attended the Health 2.0 conference and was impressed by the drive and the passion displayed by everyone to transform the Healthcare industry. This included entrepreneurs, policy makers, patient advocates, physicians, corporate and research organizations. The conference discussions highlighted the changing role of patients and physicians and showcased the different ways in which Web 2.0 tools had been used to help bring this change. It was a good platform to get a sneak preview into the future of the digital landscape of Healthcare and evaluate some of our strategies for getting there.
