Usability means sustainability: a note on world usability day

Today is world usability day, and the theme this year is sustainability.  I can undertsand if that might seem like a bizarre combination, or if it might appear that world usability day has jumped on some kind of bandwagon.  I don’t think the two are wildly unrelated, and I think it is timely that world usability day recognises the relationship.  The relationship comes into play in a number of ways, from better designed living spaces and cities down to feedback to technology users about their real impact, but today I want to focus on two issues: efficiency, and computer supported co-operative work.

Efficiency is, in my opinion, a really big way better usability can contribute to improved sustainability.  Consider that Ben Shneiderman found out 8 years ago that the average person spends 5.1 hours per week grappling with computer problems.  If even 25% of those people would otherwise spend those 5.1 hours doing something that didn’t require electricity, that is a huge environmental saving.  Consider also the case of Lufthansa flight 2904 where cockpit usability problems constributed the death of two people, and the scrapping of an aircraft or the Therac 25 usability problems which caused the death of two people and necessitated considerable medical treatment for two others; both of these cases highlight social, financial and environmental sustainability problems that might have been avoided with better usability.  More mundanely, consider workplace injuries caused by poor ergonomic design, or the tim you spend looking up help files: each of these is a loss in efficiency due to poor system design and lack of usability testing. Every loss in efficiency we suffer due to poor system design or technological troubles is a way that usability (measuring how real people interact wit that system)  might have produced a more sustainable product or system.

Computer Supported Co-operative Work is another area for significant growth in sustainability.  This research field has a rich hsitory of contributing to the ways in which we work, and promotes some real sustainability gains.  CSCW has been the genesis of ideas that allow us to travel less (because we can collaborate online–there are some things for which you have to be there in person, but meetins are no longer one of them), print less (because we can share and review documents online) and share ideas more readily (because electronic dissemination is so lightweight). In their own ways, each of these advantages of sharing an electronic workspace contributes to sustainability (particularly given that travel and paper are not incosiderable contributors to environmental problems) , and I have no doubt that CSCW will continue to provide stepping stones to sustanability gains in the future.

I could talk about any number of other ways that usability helps create a more sustainable world, but I need to get off this computer and go and do something requiring no electricity.  In the meantime, I thoroughly recommend this post on ways you can check the usability of behaving sustanably in your area.  What are the barriers you face in living sustainably that could be improved with better system design?

New user experience person working in (digital) libraries

A couple of days ago I found another person who is doing work pretty similar to me, only she blogs about her practical work a lot more than I do.  Lorraine is posting a series of usability analyses on digital library sites and software, and her insights are very interesting.  You can read her blog at lorrainepaterson.wordpress.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (lorraine_p).  I’ve also added her to my blogroll.

Why users like federated search (even though they shouldn’t)

‘Federated Search’ is a library term, it refers to search engines that search a variety of library databases (things that contain journal articles, conference papers and the like) and combine the results in some way to be presented to the user.

Federated searching is a somewhat fraught topic in libraries; many librarians don’t like federated searching and are hestitant to recommend it to library users.  This reluctance is not without good reason–federated search is inferior in many ways to using native database search interfaces, including problems with relevance ranking, the false appearance of comprehensiveness, and the inadequate de-duplication that many offer.  On the other side of this, federated search offers the holy grail of library searching: a single search box (well, almost–federated search usually doesn’t include the local catalogue, though sometimes it does, as in this example at UNSW).  The single search box is seen as being “like Google” in offering users a lot of different content from one search–and even has a slight edge over Google scholar in that search results will usually reflect more closely than Google Scholar which results a searcher can actually access.

Federated search has some issues that would normally be pretty big rpoblems from a user perspective too:

• The relevance ranking doesn’t really work. Because federated search is pulling in material from a range of sources, each of which use different approaches to relevance ranking and different metrics to express a rank.  Any combination of these results is likely to produces flawed relevance ranking.  This means that often, the most relevant results will not be in the magical first couple of pages.
• Federated search is very, very slow.  Again, because federated search is searching a number of remote databases and then applying some metric to combine results before these are presented to the user, federated search is very slow. Typically users are unhappy with slow response times, so this should be a real problem for users.

So, we know librarians are often hesitant about recommending federated search, and that users have every reason not to like it…and yet study after study shows that users do like and use federated search.  So why is federated search so popular?

• One stop shopping: Federated search offers users a one-stop shop, and even though they know it isn’t as good, they will often use it anyway.
• Time saving: Despite the long load time for search results, users know they will save themselves time (and likely frustration) by visiting only a single site.
• Search syntax: Search syntax varies slightly from site to site, and federated search allows users to forgo learning the variationson syntax required by individual databases.  Given that we know boolean searching is hard (sorry, paywall), it is easy to surmise that learning less about it is considered a good thing by users.
• Low user expectations: Users expect library systems to be slow and clunky, so their expectations of federated search are lower than they would be for other web-based services.

Users’ willingness to use a system we don’t expect them to like is an object lesson in how usability principles are not entirely universal: Occasionally users will tolerate unusable systems over more-usable ones because the end result is still a faster and easier user experience.

So, does users’ willingness to put up with the limitations of federated search mean we should stop striving for anything better? I don’t think so.  I think that as web technology improves, users will have less tolerance for slow and clunky systems.  We’ve already seen this at Swinburne with the library catalogue–while it hasn’t changed our users surveys show increasing levels of dissatisfaction as a result of user expectations that have been raised by their interactions with other systems.  I don’t believe that users are going to be willing to individually visit library databases in the future any more than they are now; even Google is meshing different kinds of data in its search results.  I believe there is real benefit to be had for librarians and library users alike in making headway in one-stop searching, I’m very much looking forward to seeing Primo Central and Summon (the next generation of federated search, where metadata is locally indexed making search faster and relevance ranking better) in action.  In the meantime though?  Users still like federated search, even though it is slow and awkward.

Connex: a great example of systemic failure to care

Tell me, if you wanted your automated train ticket machines cleared, would you choose 823 AM on Monday as a good time to do it?  Even if ticket clearing takes 13 minutes? Even if, during those 13 minutes, four trains stop that station according to your schedule, and in fact 6 actually stop because two are running late?  Even if it was a station where not many trains stop, because it is not a primary station? Even if there is no other way for your passengers to buy tickets, unless they have enough coins (tickets start at $3.70)? Even if you regularly ended up with 10+ people waiting behind you?

No, neither would I, and yet between them, this is what Connex and Armorguard think is a good idea.  There is actually plenty of scope to clear the ticket machines at that station where not one single train stops there, even during weekdays.  I’ve written about Connex before because of their poor approach to user experience, and while they have often given me cause to do it again, I didn’t want this to be the “I hate Connex” blog, so I’ve left it alone. This particular example, though, was a  perfect demonstration of how little Connex cares about its’ customers’ user experience, particularly when you factor in the Connex guards who were present to prevent the “fare evasion” not being physically able to buy a ticket during peak hour might normally cause.

It comes as no surprise that Connex have lost their contract for the Melbourne metro train system, and while it is likely true that the State government needs to come to the party if services are genuinely to be improved, I won’t miss the callous disregard Connex shows for its customers, nor their pre-recorded message apologising “for any inconvenience caused”. There are things the new operator can do, even without government support, that will show that they are interested in their users’ experience of their system, and this more than anything will make a difference to that experience.

Apologising: Google is doing it right

As some of you will know, gmail went down for 100 minutes early thismorning.  I did notice it, but assumed it was my internet connection acting weird again–and I didn’t really need to read email at 7AM anyway.  For people elsewhere, however (for example in the US where this was anything from midday to close of business) and even people in New Zealand where the workday was just beginning this could have been a real problem, especially for those using gmail for business porposes.

Given how reliable Google usually is, this sudden and lengthy failure will understandably shake confidence in the service, and may even make people more righteously angry than service failures by unreliable companies (consider my eyerolling acceptance above, when I thought the problem was my ISP).

Generally speaking, users can think one of three ways when things go wrong (and lets face it, things do go wrong sometimes with any product or service):

• That the product or service is unreliable and therefore they have lost faith in the product or service and the parent company
• That something went wrong, but that the company did what they could about it and the solution was acceptable so they will continue to use the product or service
• That the resolution to the problem was not satisfactory, but that they have no option but to use the company next time anyway (for example when the company has a monopoly–if this is the case though, as soon as the company no longer has a monoply they can expect customers to jump ship).

Google probably has a lot of people in the second category after today, because they did two things right: They updated people, and they wrote a fabulous and public apology.  The apology was probably even more effective than one normally would be because a large company apologised for an outage in a free service, but there are a few other things Google did right:

• They apologised unreservedly, and with an understanding of their users.  There was no “we’re really sorry but it wasn’t our fault” or “we’re really sorry but you shouldn’t be so mad”–they understood why people might be annoyed, and they said sorry.
• They explained the cause of the problem.  Not everyone is going to care about this, but it is good practice to explain for those who do, when writing for a public audience
• They described what they are doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
• They subtly reminded users why they chose gmail in the first place, not by saying “we are the most reliable”, but “we’re trying to keep failures rare”.
• The apology was public (right up there on Google’s gmail blog), but not forced on those who didn’t notice the failure.

This is probably the work of Google’s PR people, but dealing with the failures that inevitably happen in life is a really important part of good user experience, and (I swear I don’t work for Google) this is one that Google have done really well.

How to deal with ‘too much information’: where should we put search refinement facets?

Swinburne Library is in the process of making some changes; we’re replacing our library system with a fancy new one, and as the user-experience-person-in-situ it is up to me to make suggestions for the search and discovery interface our users will see.  Some of those decisions I will blog about here, and search facet placement is one of them.

Search facets are one of the search tools that I think will be most instrumental in making stuff easier to find (and the OCLC report (PDF) on user expectations vs. librarian expectations suggests library users feel the same way). Facets are the little categories you see on search interfaces that let you narrow down your search results to things that are more relevant to you; they started out in tools with well-defined metadata (like eBay and Amazon, and even some of the newer library systems) and they are slowly working their way into searches with less-well-defined metadata, like Google.

With anything new like this, though, you have to figure out where in the search interface to put it.  So far I have seen facets placed to the left of search results:

to the right of search results:

and below search results:

At Swinburne, we talked a bit about facet placement, and in all likelihood ours will be on the left.

So, what are the arguments for and against each position?

• Facets below search results: When facets are below search results, they don’t distract the user when they are viewing search results, which is a good thing.  However, given that the vast majority of users don’t scroll all the way down, and only look at the first couple of pages of search results (and they look more at the first results on these pages), placing facets below search result is pretty likely to mean that users don’t see them or use them.  This likelihood is reinforced by the fact that this is a significantly uncommon location for facets, so users won’t think to look for them here.
• Facets to the right of search results: From a user-centred-design purist standpoint, in my opinion the right-hand position for facets is probably the best in an interface where the language is read from left to right.  This position means that user see search result first, and then facets if the search results don’t contain anything immediately useful.  Given the number of commonly used interfaces that put facets on the left, however, this could be a risky proposal.
• Facets to the left of search results: This is what Google have gone with (possibly because their advertising is on the right).  It is also common in other commonly-used information seeking interfaces, such as eBay, Dymocks (in Australia) and Amazon (for the US and the UK). Use of these interfaces will train users to look to the left for facets; and it would seem that at least a small sample of users have already developed this preference for left-hand search facets.

Swinburne has a real opportunity with this project to provide a search interface for our users that is not “slow motion search, typical library“; however, to do this we must pay as much attention as we can to our users.  Putting the search facets to the left is just one of the decisions we will make with the users in mind, and I hope to blog about more in the future.

Google search isn’t just search anymore

I know I’m a bit lot late to the table with this, but Google search isn’t restricted to just searching anymore!  They’ve introduced some browsing tools as well (see the video below for more):

Now, it’s easy to figure out that I am very pro-browsing, and therefore I think it’s great that Google has included these things into their search experience, but I’d like to unpack just why I think browsing is such a good thing (and make a couple of suggestions for extensions of what Google is doing) along the way.

Google has been very pro-search as an information organisation and finding strategy for a long time, their search-don’t-sort appraoch to gmail being one obvious example of this.  It’s completely understandable that this has been Google’s whole approach for so long, after all, search is what they do (and they do it very well).

Search isn’t always the answer though (and if you watch this video of a Google user experience researcher talking about the search options, it is evident that Google knows that).  For one things, humans employ more than just search in their information seeking strategies: the research (PDF) shows that information seeking is generally an interative process that includes searching, browsing, and refinement.  Not only is search not the only approach we use for finding information, but sometimes search isn’t enough on its own: with all the information on the web, it can be hard to know when someone types ‘Placebo’ into a search box whether they want to know about the psychological effects of sugar pills, or whether they’re interested in the British based rock band (this ambiguity applies to any number of terms). Similarly, information seekers may want a particular type of information (for example reviews, or places where a product can be bought), or information from a particular geographic location, time or author, or general subject field.  Also, even with known-item searches (those where the searcher knows exactly what they are looking for, and that it exists somewhere, because they have found a pointer to it or seen it) if the searcher doesn’t remember the exact words that occur in the document, they might not find what they are looking for.

Google’s ‘more search options’ are beginning to deal with this problem.  They allow people to find three specific types of content (reviews, forums and video), they provide suggested search terms, they allow the user to look at results from a specific time, and also see how the search terms popularity has changed over time.  I’m not entirely sure what value the ‘wonder wheel (see below)’ adds, given that the related search terms provide all the wonder wheel terms and more, but  I suppose some people may find the visual presentation useful.

It certainly is heartening, for someone as vested in browsing as I am, to see Google incorporating browsing into their search.  All I want now is to see it expanded:  I want to filter news by topic and country (and standard search results for that matter); when I use Scholar, I want to be able to browse by author or year.  What Google has provided is an excellent start, and I look forward to seeing where this goes in the future.

Global corporate challenge not that global: Where on my dress do I put this pedometer?

Today is the first day of the global corporate challenge (or GCC), a challenge where you team up with six of your closest workmates and try to walk 10,000 steps (or more) per day each.  The theory is that by increasing workers’ average number of steps from 3,500 (the stated pre-challenge average on the GCC web site) to 10,000, those who participate in the challenge will see an increase in health and wellbeing from their increased activity levels.

Making people feel better is an admirable goal, and despite the wider issues with the GCC (for example prioritisation of walking over all other forms of activity, as evidenced by the ridiculously stingy cycle to walk conversion, the “speeding ticktets” issued for those who do too much exercise, and the relatively rigid defninition of an athlete) both testimonials and research show that it is helping at least some of its participants to feel better, and that’s a good thing.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that I am regular exerciser (on average 6 days per week) who does a variety of types of exercise (cycling, walking, aerobics, weight training, swimming, yoga…), who is female, and who is participating in the GCC.  As a participant, and as a usability consultant I have one major problem with how things work within the parameters of the GCC:  The pedometers we have been issued.

The rules of the GCC state that steps can only be entered from the official GCC pedometer (each participant gets two pedometers at the beginning of the challenge).  Given that one could reasonably expect that approximately 50% of participants are likely to be women (or maybe slightly more, if we take into account that cross culturally, women appear to walk more than men (PDF)) the choice of pedometer design for the challenge seems less than ideal.

The pedometer is the type designed to be worn on a waistband, completely upright, at one’s hip.  Moreover it does not have the type of clip that opens and closes, but rather it slides down over the top of a waistband.  This makes it considerably difficult to wear with a wide variety of women’s clothing:

• Women’s trouser styles are much more likely to have trousers stop at the waist (or above the hip) than men
• Skirts are often held up by women’s hips, meaning they too sit higher than the ideal for pedometer placement
• Dresses leave nowhere to clip the pedometer at all. Given that this is a coroporate challenge, and women  are in some corporations required to wear a skirt (and that even where it is not required, in some places it is recommended), the pedometer not really working with a dress seems a considerable oversight)
• Belts and sashes make the pedometer difficult to clip on because of the thickness of the material
• The style of clip means the pedometer is much more likely than an open-close clip to come off when trousers are pulled down–arguably something women are likely to do more often than men.

There are alternative styles of pedometer (including those that can be worn around the neck or placed in a bag, and watch-style pedometers), so I assume that the pedometer chosen by the GCC was based on some combination of accuracy and price. In my opinion, neither accuracy nor price can justify the difficulty presented to women by this model of pedometer (when alternatives are available.  Clip-style pedometers are only accurate when worn at all (impossible with some women’s clothing), and worn in the right place, so many women’s readings will not be accurate.  The entry fee for the GCC was nearly $100 AUD per person, and for this it would seem considerably more sensible to supply participants with pedometers that actually count all their steps accurately, rather than providing backpacks, hats, water bottles and extra pedometers.

Like the clip-style ipod shuffle, it feels like the organisers of the GCC just didn’t think about the whole population when they were making design decisions, and as a result of this women participants are disadvantaged (at least in terms of their step count, if not in terms of their actual gained benefit).  To let the organisers know for next year, I will be emailing a link to this blog post to their follow up email, included on the pedometer box, and I encourage all other participants to do the same.

Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to participating in the challenge, and perhaps learning something about my daily habits (I’m well over the 3,500 average workers make without having done any actual targeted steps, so it is nice to know that I am not as sedentary as the average worker, for example).  If only I could figure out where to clip the thing for those two weddings I have to go to…

The new Facebook: Not yet unfriended by users, but close

Facebook recently made a change to their interface that was the subject of outrage for many of their users, inspiring more than 1.7 million to sign a petition to reject it.  Facebook has made some changes to accomodate some of the things users said were problems, but many of the changes (including the slower-to-render rounded corners on pictures) appear to be here to stay.

Initially I was mildly irritated by the new interface, but I put it down to my change aversion (users near-universally hate change, which is why if you’re making major changes, they better help users out substantially).  However, as time has gone on, I have become more irritated with the new interface, not less.  As I see it, there are a few problems with the new interface:

• The proliferation of nonsense in my news feed, without an option to show status updates only.  Yes, I can turn the rubbish from every application off, if I want to, but this requires effort on my part, and will happen every time a new crop of applications becomes popular.  It’s also fairly irritating that I had to go to a help guide to even find out how to do this much, because the mechanism for operating these options is hidden unless you happen to look in the right place at the right time.
• Another side of the same coin: having to edit applications not to publish my life story immediately upon adding them.  I don’t particularly want to bombard my friends with nonsense every time I play a turn in Lexulous.  This means I have to be particularly pro-active in editing the settings for my applications so that they don’t bombard people, and the function for editing this is reasonably difficult to find
• The lack of automatic updating.  I know the old interface didn’t have it, but the trade off for change was supposed to be that we got automatic updating. This change has had no benefit for me, so I resent the fact that the one useful thing that was supposed to happen didn’t.

Do I think no interface should ever change their look and feel?  Absolutely not.  Do I think that Facebook should have done some usability testing before lanching this design?  For sure.  Do I think they did?  Dubious at best.  The Facebook approach, which is one that will always generate negative publicity, is to test their designs on real live users.

According to this blog post, the best way to plan change requires four steps: knowing your customers, listening to them, communicating with them, and responding to them. I think that sounds pretty good–pretty much like doing good user experience, in fact.  And Facebook didn’t do too badly, on a points system–they did warn users (albeit not in a way that most users would notice), and they did respond to some of the complaints users had (albeit not in a way that is really that satisfying).  Unfortunately, you can’t pick and choose which things you want out of that list–good user experience requires all of them.

Nonetheless, I think many (if not most) Facebook users will suck up the changes, even though they don’t like them, because for now, Facebook offers them more than the changes have taken away.  Having said that, though, like I said in my earlier post about Facebook and MySpace, people have personal purposes for using social networking tools.  If Facebook continues to change in a way that breaks that purpose (as the first iteration of these changes did), they will find that users (and thus their advertising dollars) drift away.

What product or service have you used that has slowly worn away at your loyalty until you couldn’t stand it any more?

When things go wrong, communicate

In three separate instances recently, I have been frustrated by poor communication on the part of service industries I deal with.

In the first instance I was drastically affected by an airline schedule change, and it was not made at all clear to me what my options were–and when I worked it out and tried to to take advantage of the best option for me, the airline tried to charge me for it, claiming I had “already agreed to the schedule change”.  To be fair, I did eventually get what I needed with no additional fees to pay, and I was thrilled, but it seems a bit sad to be thrilled by an airline doing the right thing.

In the second, I found out that my favourite class was being cancelled at my local recreation centre from feedback they posted publically to another class, saying they would be moving that class into the room we had previously occupied.

In the third case, I was phoned the day before a booked appointment to say that I would not be able to keep my appointment (and offered two less convenient times as alternatives) because the professional I was to see was “not in”.  When I pressed to try and see the person with whom I had an existing relationship, I was told they had left the business.  This from a business that would charge me a 50% cancellation fee if I were to cancel within 24 hours of an appointment.

In all three of these cases, the disappointing thing that happened was inevitable, and I am not blaming the companies concerned for what happened.  What I am blaming them for, and what really made me angry, was their inability to communicate with me properly and in a timely fashion about the issues which affected me, and the paucity of alternatives I was offered (at least in the first and third cases).

Things go wrong in life, particularly in those industries where a product and a service are sold together.  In most cases users will be pretty forgiving if they understand what has gone wrong, and you communicate with them and explain what their options are from the outset.  In the instances where something goes wrong, communication is the key to keeping a user as happy as it is humanly possible to do, and keeping them using your service rather than anyone else’s.

Has anyone else had an experience where communication made the difference between grudging satisfaction and outright annoyance?