Try to Be a Test User Sometime

In pilot studies, you can occasionally relax the need for real users and
let members of your own team serve as test participants. It's good for
them.
	
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for August 15:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/being-a-test-user.html
	
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Usability Week 2011 conference

  * San Francisco: September 25-30
  * Austin, TX: October 3-7
  * London: November 13-18

Full program:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events

DEADLINE
  * Save 10% on San Francisco early bird deadline: NEXT FRIDAY, Aug. 26

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WINDOWS PHONE 7 USABILITY TESTING

Last week we ran a series of studies with users of Windows Phone 7, to
update our various mobile training seminars for the San Francisco
Usability Week next month. We still have a month to do the detailed data
analysis, but my preliminary conclusion is that the main design guidelines
for mobile usability don't change: the big findings were the same as for
the iPhone and Android users we also tested last week.

Windows Phone 7 tested quite nicely, though the application store has too
many usability problems. (But so does Apple's store with its clunky iTunes
UI.) Unfortunately, it's still not quite there. I can easily see how v.8
might become a killer, though.

One big plus for WinPhone can be exemplified by this user comment: I know
what this icon means because it's similar to what I see on my PC.

(If you're not so lucky to own the world's most used desktop software,
you'll have to design mobile icons that work on their own merits, and not
all the ones we tested did. More on this in the seminar on Visual Design
for Mobile – 3rd link below.)

A big downside for WP7 is that we now observe accidental activation of the
system buttons, in addition to the problems of accidental touches inside
the apps that plagues iOS and Android. Also WP7 suffers just as much as
Android from the same lack of predictable and consistent use of the
buttons throughout the apps. MS (and Google) needs to crack down on apps
designers who don't understand usability. Much as people deplore Apple's
overly aggressive attitude towards its apps store, there's something to be
said for platform-wide enforcement of a UI standard.

Detailed findings to be reported next month:

  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/mobile.html
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/mobile_apps.html
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/mobile_visual_design.html

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BING IPAD LASSO

After dining Microsoft a bit for usability but praising them for icons, I
have the opposite comment on the "lasso" feature introduced in Bing for
iPad. The icon really doesn't look like a lasso to me, not does it suggest
the functionality of the feature (to "rope in" a set of words as a
shortcut for issuing them as a search query).

While the icon could be better, the feature is quite neat, and follows one
of the key usability guidelines for mobile and tablets: to reduce typing
and lower interaction costs. As MS gleefully points out, copy-paste is
painful with the standard Apple UI, and yet it's a fairly common use case
that you want to search for something that's already on the screen. In my
case, that's often email, though, and Lasso only works within the Bing
app. Should be a system-wide generic command. Presumably it will be in
future Windows tablets.

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WHY ARE RESTAURANT WEBSITES SO BAD?

  > http://www.slate.com/id/2301228/

Nice dissection of bad sites (and a few good ones, such as Morton's). This
problem annoys me as well, since I like to eat. The better the restaurant,
the worse the site.

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FACEBOOK BUTCHERS MY OLD OFFICE

Facebook has taken over the Menlo Park office building where I worked in
the 1990s. They promptly knocked out the interior walls and changed the
single-occupancy offices into an open cubicle landscape. This will
drastically reduce programmer productivity.

Much research has shown that software development is particularly
demanding of cognitive resources: you have to keep a lot of stuff in your
brain at the same time while programming. Even a one-minute interruption
erases this info, and it can take 10-15 minutes to re-establish the
programmer's mental state.

Offices where you can close the door are the second-most important thing
you can do to enhance productivity in software development.

The most important is to hire the best programmers. Individual differences
are much larger in programming than in most other tasks. Presumably this
is also due to the cognitively taxing nature of the job.

For more on individual differences in various types of computer use, see:

   > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/performance_variability.html

(The third proven way to improve programmer productivity is to send them
on a touch-typing course.)