Stumbled upon a very interesting talk by Stefana Broadbent on TED. It deals with Internet and how it enables intimacy. While the talk in general is quite interesting, I was struck more with how small our social networks really are. This is a topic close to my heart since it concerns the topic of my Master Thesis (Social Network Interaction based on Location).

The idea behind it is that our Social Networks online are not representative of our actual social network. As it turns out, this is in fact the truth: the average person only communicates with 5 – 7 people in their intimate circle, using technology. Facebook is also quite interesting: the average user has about 120 friends but two way communication only takes place between 4 -6 people, depending on your gender.

It does make me realize that Social Networks don’t adequately deal with the fact that our actual relationships are vastly different from those depicted on our online profile.

(Sources are at 1:30)

A long time ago I complained about widespread usage of the iTunes play/pause button combo and why I think it is a bad idea. Seems that history has the tendency to repeat itself, but this time in a slightly different form (and arguably this time for the worse).

If you have ever used an iPhone you’ll notice that there are some really cool gestures that you can do.  Amongst them is this cool little On/Off gesture. It works really well on the iPhone, the gesture is natural and very clear when you have tried it once or twice. Great.

Lately I have started to encounter this little interaction in different places that are certainly not gesture based. Prime example of this was Spotify. The latest Spotify builds allow you to sync some playlists to you hard drive giving you access to it offline (which is great). Instead of using a good old checkbox to do the trick, they have resorted to copying the iPhone’s way of of doing it, with a slider. The massive difference is though that sliding with your mouse is a lot harder to do than swiping with your finger on a screen.

The kicker however is the fact that this little slider is not even a slider, although you’ll forgive anyone for thinking it is one. It actually behaves rather differently from the iPhone slider, namely that you have to click it to change its state.

My guess is that when they developed the iPhone client of Spotify they thought that simply using the controls that are being used in on the iPhone would also work on the desktop. Well, guess again.

Sometimes I stumble on good new UI experiments and every once in a while I like it so much, I take some time to write about them.  This one is from Amazon and as far as I can tell it has been rolled out across all their services (.com/.de/.co.uk ). What it does is, it guesses in which category the item you are searching for might fall. In my case I was searching for Bill Buxton. It guessed that  what I was looking for was found in the Books section. That in itself is not terribly useful since I am mostly likely to be looking for Bill Buxton’s books and not his movies, seeing as he is only an author and not a movie producer too (yet?) and I will most probably get books only anyway.

However, it gets a lot more useful when searching for stuff that is found in different sorts of categories. A good example of that would be Donald Duck. Below you’ll see that Amazon filters your query automatically into the different categories.

My only qualms with it is, is that it is not directly distinguishable from search results, apart from the fact that it was indented. Perhaps colour could take care of that.

With Dr Pete as example, hereby an apology. Haven’t been blogging in more than a month, which coincides more or less with the date when my Masters in Potsdam started. Things have been rather busy, but hopefully I will be able to find the time to blog more actively. In the mean time, thanks to the thousands of people who have downloaded and spread both my e-books, available for download here. Your support and interest has been fantastic.

As part of what I consider to be a trilogy, I recently re-read Donald Norman’s Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. It takes a slightly different direction than his (at that time) previous book, The Design of Everyday Things. Written in a style that combines scientific research with personal experience, Norman tells the story of why things should not just be usable, as suggested in The Design of Everyday Things, but he also elaborates on the the more reflective elements of design.

Divided up in two parts, the book deals initially with the theoretical basis of emotional design and then it delves into the practicality. However, I it felt as if the final two chapters (Emotional Machines, The Future of Robots) was more suited for the third book in the installment called The Design of Future things.

However, having said that, I think this book does a good job of discussing the field of emotional design, but more importantly, to me at least it is an indication that even if you can scientifically proof your new way of typing/printing/login is faster or better, your still need to deal with the softer, much less definable emotional side of design.

The three titles are as follows:
The Design of Everyday Things
Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
The Design of Future Things

A loooong time ago, me and two friends (Joel Laumans and Rogier Bikker) started a blog called notusable. On it, we reported on usability stuff. We got some hits, reached the frontpage of digg (back when digg was still relevant). notusable sort of died and soon it will be removed from the Rotterdam University servers.

All three of us went on to blog a little on our own, with Joel currently running being involved in creating inspiration and Rogier blogging about his experiences in Shanghai.

Back then, we blogged about things that were supposedly not usable, as the title of the blog might suggest. When I started writing here three years ago, the theme was also the same. Over the years though, the direction of writing here as changed a little. Having had some success with two ebooks (Wireframing using Indesign and Introduction to Good Usability), I felt the pressure of writing longer, more researched posts. However, I now think that perhaps the original format, of short posts about real life usability experiences, good and bad, might be a better suited on a blog, especially since your IQ drops about 10 points when multitasking online.

Because of this, I hope to change the direction of my blog slightly, upping the frequency of posting and focusing more on interesting usability examples found in the real world and online. I can’t promise anything, but I will give it a shot.

This morning I found the term “twitterpurge” trending on twitter. It lead me to a post by Robert Scoble. Scoble un-following his 106,000 twitter followers may have lead to a mini-trend on twitter, resulting in many other users cleaning up their own followers lists. No doubt that things along these lines have occurred for quite some time. Who hasn’t rid their MSN friend list of some primary school contacts?

This purging phenomenon however, is quite interesting and highlights some inherent problems in human relationships on social networks. Cleaning up your friends list requires you to very explicitly re-evaluate every relationship on a particular network. In our real lives we are hardly ever confronted with this. People drift in and out of our social circles and it is a very naturally occurring process. Only in very dramatic settings have I publicly declared to have broken off contact with a friend.

Part of the problem is the auto-friending that occurs on some networks (whether via a machine or personally). It leaves the floodgates open for hundreds of meaningless contacts to seep in. Subsequently, as Scoble says, the whole social network experience becomes unmanageable because the system is not capable of assessing which of these contacts are meaningful or not. What’s more, these contacts or links, never gets removed, they are always there, unless specifically removed. It is as if you are compiling an ever increasing list of people you have ever socially interacted with.

The Dunbar’s number is also very often grossly exceeded on many social networks. My personal Facebook account (231 “friends”) is one such example. But, in it’s defense, social networks aren’t exactly like our real social networks, probably exactly because of the reason’s stated above.

This post has been a long time in the making, not necessarily writing, but I have spent some time mulling over the idea. The tipping point came when I saw a lecture by Scott Jenson (Mobile User Interface Manager at Google) for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar. In it, Scott talks about why putting the web on your mobile is a bad idea, something that must of us can probably agree on. He names a very good example (Google Maps) of how you should adapt your UI, based on the platform (web vs mobile) that it is being used on. Forward to 32:50 for the details.

Whilst browsing the web might be an extreme example of how this is done (wrong), even smaller changes in input or output can change the interaction methods. Example would be having an extra monitor. The fact that I have two impacts my usage pattern in the sense that I switch less between windows, do much more dragging of content between visible windows, or might have a harder time finding where my windows are hidden.

A more subtle example would be having a scroll wheel on a device that enables you to navigate very quickly through lists (A), vs having to press a button every time you want to go up or down in the list of items (B).

At first glance the implications of this are simply that you’d have to restrict yourself on Device B with the amount of menu’s you can bury in a menu. This however, affects the entire application. Not only do you need to restrict yourself to the amount of items in the list, you need to design the application in such a way that all the features are still accessible. When you can jump up and down in lists without problems, such as in A, you can afford to have a very flat menu structure, perhaps only 2 levels deep. On B, because you can’t fit so much in one screen, you’d need to design in such a way that you can still fit in all the functionality, whilst dealing with the restrictions. It requires a much deeper structure.

This illustrates that even the smallest change on seemingly similar devices require you to think twice about simply porting over your interface from one platform to the next. I don’t read my physical copy of The Economist in the same way as I do with the online version. Why should mobile application be any different?

PS: thanks to Barry for the tip about the lectures.

While looking around for ways in which Airlines depict their booking information I came across two major themes: the calendar view and the dropdown. Below is a comparison of what’s good and bad about the two and a look at how they can be combined.
Calendar: Lufthansa

The good: What I like most about this pattern is that it allows the user to see an oversight of the month they are viewing. This simplifies the decision making process somewhat and offers more information about the date they choose. It is helpful when you want to explicitly fly on a particular day, such as Saturday.

The bad: As is often the case when booking airline tickets, you want to book months ahead. This means that you’d have to click through until you reach the month you want to fly in. If this 6 months from now, this leads to a lot of clicking. Accidentally clicking outside of the calender box removes the entire thing, probably causing frustration. The use case for booking tickets is also a different: you might be shopping around on various sites simultaneously, with 5 or 6 tabs open, in each one looking for flights on the exact same date. This means that you have most likely already chosen two dates and don’t need to be reminded on what day 12 December is. In this case you lose the advantage of having an oversight and the browsing becomes a tedious task.

Drop Down: Baltic Air

The good: Here we have exactly the opposite as at Lufhansa. Through a drop-down you select the dates, maximum amount of clicks: 2. Referring back to the use case of booking tickets, this quick input can be advantageous.

The bad Drop downs cover other navigation elements. You loose oversight of what day you are booking your ticket and a drop down certainly does not remind me of a calendar.

It needs to be mentioned: Baltic Air gives you the option to try both options, although they use a popup to achieve this.

Combination: Dutch Railways

The good:Initially I was skeptical about this pattern since I can name very few times (if any) that I have looked at tickets months in advance. Taking the train in The Netherlands is also more akin to taking a tram, which makes me question why such an elaborate calender is needed. However, I am sold on this because it combines the best of both worlds: a monthly oversight, and a quick way to jump to dates relatively far ahead.

The bad: I am curious how often people actually do check dates far ahead in the future. As with the Baltic air example, the drop down covers other content, which is never really good, but it’s a trade off.

To conclude: I don’t really think any of these are better or worse to such a degree that it is crippling usability. However, the use cases of these sites play an important factor in deciding what pattern is appropriate. For journeys happening withing short notice (buses, trains, etc.) the calendar might be good. For bookings 6 months from now, this might not always be the case.

For a long time now Lufthansa has been doing something on their site that I found ingenious every time I saw it: how they presented their fare’s and dates. It so incredibly simple and yet amazingly efficient. I never bothered to blog about it though, until I saw it pop up on a few other sites.

As opposed to showing you a list of dates and prices for departing and returning flights, they put the prices into a grid with the dates as X/Y values, making it a lot easier to find out what date is cheapest to fly. As an added touch, the cheapest day/flight combination was also highlighted. I wondered why I wasn’t encountering it more often. Recently I did go shopping for some airline tickets and much to my delight I saw Lufthansa’s design pattern implemented. I did a bit of research and found a few more airlines that were doing it. Below some of the results.

Lufthansa
The original (just to be clear: I am not sure whether Lufthansa used it first, I did however encounter it there for the first time). Lufthansa indicates your current date by highlighting them and adding an arrow. What I love most is the color indication given:

Finnair
Here is almost a direct copy, with the difference that the cheapest prices are sadly not highlighted:

KLM
The Dutch carrier implements the grid exactly the same, except for the dates, which are outlined as opposed to highlighted with colour:

I guess you can truly appreciate how nice this works if you see the alternative, which wasn’t hard to find.

Easy Jet
This represenation isn’t all that bad and the attempt is somewhat reminiscent, but it still doesn’t give me the nice oversight:

Olympic Airlines
Finally, if you look at Olympic’s offering you might start to wonder who thought that was a good idea, especially compared to the first three examples shown:

I wasn’t able to find any examples on US Airlines, so perhaps this is a European development. By all accounts though: I think it is a big improvement.