Dana’s user experience blog

WordPress has just added a feature to include related links to the end of your posts — which is a good feature, and one that users wanted — but done it in such a way that it has really annoyed their users. Tony alerted me to this, and Lavratus Pradeo has a good, brief summary of what is wrong with this feature as implemented (creates links to content that may be unsavoury by the blog owner’s definition, while implying that the links are endorsed by the blog owner), and more importantly, how to turn it off.

There is a user experience lesson in this. WordPress took a feature that their users wanted, and tried to make it significantly better for WordPress, but in so doing made it significantly worse for their users. The end result of this is that WordPress is getting criticized heavily on the blogs they host, and that many people (probably every non-spammer that hears about this and reads the instructions on how to turn it off) will not use the feature. This situation is lose-lose — WordPress (especially by rolling out the feature without telling anyone) appears to its users to have acted in bad faith, and users still don’t get the feature they have been requesting. Had WordPress executed this mopre sensibly, their users, delighted with the extra feature, would be singing their praises right now instead of condemning them. The moral of the story is that it is best to provide users with what they actually want, rather than what it is felt they ought to want.

Update 29 April 2008: I saw some of these today, and the words ‘Automatically generated’ have been added to ‘Related posts’.  This addresses the potential reader misconception that the posts are recommended by the blog author, but not the other problems listed in the links above.  This is a step in the right direction, but not a complete solution.

Again I have left this blog too long without a post, and again it is because I have been travelling. As much as I used to love to travel, I am now throughly sick of it — sick of waiting in airport lounges and lines, sick of the poor design of systems that require me to fill out a card when there could be a machine that scanned my passport and boarding card (if you really need my signature, how about I just sign my boarding card?), sick of trying to decide if kohl pencil counts as a liquid (it doesn’t) and sick of answering the question “have you got any liquids aerosols or gels in your carry on?” with the cumbersome “yes, and it is packed in a clear 1l plastic bag”. Many of these irritations could be dramatically reduced by better systems, and in many cases, I could fly business class to reduce my aggravation.

Business class/first class on airlines really are the ultimate sale of a user experience, as opposed to a user necessity, for the vast majority of passengers; the extra movies, better food, and real cutlery are all nice, but they don’t help you to do business any better at the other end. I can’t find any statistics on how many passengers who are flying business class are actually on business, but my guess would be less than half. And lets face it, with business class travellers making up only 10% of travellers, but 35% of revenue (at least in the US), it makes sense to keep the business class passengers happy.

One of the privileges business class passengers get is the exclusive use of a set of toilets for their class. Generally speaking, given that they pay twice what a economy class passenger has paid, this is only appropriate. However, I recently flew back to Australia from New Zealand on the Air New Zealand Airbus A320,and the layout of the plane meant that not only did some economy passengers use the business class toilets, those who didn’t were involved in serious interruptions to service, and a general health hazard.

The A320 has 8 business class seats, and 144 economy class seats. There is one business class toilet right at the front of the plane, and two economy class toilets, both in the tail section (yes, this means that there is one toilet per 72 economy class passengers — this is less than is recommended for restaurants in the American Restroom Code (PDF), though more than is recommended for passenger terminals). There is a single centre aisle, with three seats on either side in economy class, and it’s pretty narrow. You can see a diagram of the plane layout here. Now, the flight I was on was completely full, and as always, the flight attendants began the economy class food and beverage services from the front of the plane — same with tray collection. You can see where this is all going to go wrong: given that the cart was blocking the aisle, and passengers were not allowed to go forward (though some of them did anyway, including one elderly and disabled lady), access to the toilets was severely limited for the majority of passengers for the majority of the flight. Passengers who did need to go could access the back of the plane by having the flight attendants wheel the cart back to the galley, squeezing past it, and going thus seriously interrupting service and coming very close to the food that was being served to other passengers. Once the aisle was finally cleared, there was a significant line of people waiting, all out of their seats and definitely not wearing seatbelts, which puts those passengers (and the people seated around them) at greater risk of injury (and it was nearly made illegal in the wake of 9/11). What’s more, with the prevalence of moderate urinary incontinence at a minimum of 3% among men and women, this had a high probability of causing someone discomfort and/or embarrassment.

It’s all very well to sell an excellent user experience to your business class passengers, who pay more. It’s not appropriate, however, to create barriers to accessing necessary facilities to uphold the exclusivity of this experience. Air New Zealand, and indeed any airline using this aircraft in this configuration needs to consider either offering economy class passengers access to the business class toilets or designing the cabin space so there is alternative access to the back of the cabin or a toilet at the front. Selling a great user experience at a premium is a good idea, but not if it compromises the health, safety, and basic comfort of your other users.

In the past year or so, there has been a lot of hype about Second Life, both in libraries, and in general. First-life companies have been trying to figure out how to commercialise Second Life (somewhat unsuccessfully, it would appear), and some social problems that have involved Second Life (which is not to say that these problems weren’t there anyway, just that Second Life lowers the barriers to them) have emerged.

Because of the library hype surrounding Second Life, I decided I should give it a go (much like I gave LambdaMOO a go once upon a time), and like all 3D environments, I hated it. I found the graphics clunky and slow, the interface difficult to operate, and I never got off the tutorial island. Mostly I hated it, though, because I couldn’t drive my avatar, and I suspect this is because (like 8% of young people, and a significantly greater number of older people) I have reduced stereoacuity, and the 3D model presented on my screen is very little like anything I see in real life.

So, what should Swinburne Library be doing with Second Life? My answer would be “nothing” for a number of reasons, including:

• As of August 2007 (the latest statistics I found) there were 13,567 active* Second Life Avatars based in Australia, and approximately half of all users operate more than one avatar (meaning we can guess that about 9050 Australians log in regularly). Given a population of 20,434,176 Australians, this means that about 0.000443% of Australians are “active” Second Life users — even assuming that Swinburne, being a technical university, has a disproportionately high number of users, we wouldn’t be serving very many people by setting up in Second Life. Of course, we could increase the number of Second Life users by advertising our services there, but I think we would be better off evaluating and improving the services we know our users engage with outside Second Life than creating new services that rely on a commercial third party product, and which our users may not use anyway.
• Second Life requires a very high-speed internet connection and a good graphics card to be at all usable. This may put it outside the reach of many of our users — there are 17.4 broadband connections per 100 people in Australia. Even assuming that there are multiple people sharing most of these connections, and that Swinburne community members have a higher rate of broadband connections than the general population, for many of our community the only way to access to Second Life would be on campus where the video cards are not up to specification.
• If the library’s business is information, then 3D environments are not the place for us; studies have shown that users of 3D information environments perform worse in finding and management tasks than users of 2D environments.

Before I get howled down as a complete luddite, I do believe there is scope for Second Life to be used in educational environments; design schools (like the one at Swinburne) could make (and are making) excellent use of the 3D properties in teaching interior design (and I have heard of at least one example of a student fashion show in Second Life). Also, like LambdaMoo, there is scope for sociological study in Second Life, which may be interesting to Swinburne’s Institute for Social Research. Until there is evidence that research like this is happening at Swinburne, though (and that the researchers want our help in Second Life), or until large numbers of our student population “lives” there, there is little scope for the library to do anything useful there — interesting, maybe but useful definitely not. Given that we have loads of scope to do interesting and useful things in our first lives, for now, I’m going to stick with that.

*Active according to some Linden Labs (the people responsible for Second Life) definition.

I was tipped off to the angry librarian when it went around the office; if you haven’t seen it please watch it below and then read the rest of this post.

I hope that was an especially painful 5 minutes and 10 seconds — I know I found it painful, and not, as many of the commenters on YouTube did, because “that spacey girl is so dumb”. This is an excellent (if spoofed) example of a bad user experience in an unusable system that involves a human being. The girl’s task is relatively straightforward, she wants to print a picture in colour for a university assignment. When she tries (and fails) to complete the task on her own, she asks the librarian on duty for assistance.

From this point, the librarian completely fails to offer a good user experience; he doesn’t provide enough information at any stage in the proceedings for the girl to know that what she wants to do is impossible, and during their conversation, the girl (a library user, the person on the customer end of the equation) makes the only attempts that are made toward solving the problem — only to have each one rebuffed in a ruder and ruder manner.

Rebuffing the girl’s attempts to print a document in colour takes five minutes, time that is wasted for the librarian and wasted and frustrating for her. There are ways to deal with this that would have taken much less time, and would have been a much better experience for both parties:

• The obvious: Make colour printing available to students.
• If colour printing is not available for students, then make this fact obvious, and provide an alternative, for example “I’m sorry, we can’t do colour printing for students, but the copy shop next door can and is open 9am to 9pm 7 days a week”.

The bad user experience in this case was caused by an interaction between an obstinate person (the librarian) and a set of rules that would be incomprehensible to the average user (and aren’t readily available for users to read). While I am sure that this scenario is not in the least bit library-specific, this video is an excellent incentive to assess how our rules and our customer service may make our users’ lives difficult.

I have to say, I am a little uncomfortable commenting on library 2.0. I’m not a librarian, and I have neither the academic background nor the practical experience to know what Library 1.0 delivery really means, nor what the rationale is (was?) for doing things in a library 1.0 way.

There seems to be a lot of chaos over what library 2.0 actually means, which is no doubt adding to my discomfort posting about it; the general consensus seems to me to be that the difference between library 2.0 and library 1.0 is that library 2.0 is user centric and user driven; and a lot of it seems to be driven by new technologies (though it doesn’t have to be) Now, I’m all for a great user experience, and often that is something that will involve a certain amount of user centrism, but I’m decidedly ambivalent about what it means for libraries.

To go any further with this post, I have to define what I think libraries are (or should be), and this will no doubt get me in a world of trouble with my librarian co-workers: I think libraries are free access point of information of many kinds, with value added in spaces to get that information, and librarians themselves. I think the defining point of libraries is actually librarians; they select targeted authoritative collections, and can help unsure users sort the wheat from the chaff online.

Back to library 2.0, though. Some library blogs refer to library 2.0 in terms of teen gaming nights and library blogs, others talk about user control of information.  I question what any of these things have to do with librarianship — the difference between a library and the internet, as I expounded in my masters thesis, is that a library is a carefully collected information set (and the internet is not).  The internet is always going to have more choices than the library (some of which would never make it in to a library) and users are also going to be far more in control of the likes of Google than they are of EBSCO (unless EBSCO buys PageRank from Google).  Library blogs are notoriously silent, and I can’t really understand what teen gaming has to do with libraries at all.  If these things are the best library 2.0 can offer us, I’m with the Annoyed Librarian. Not only do these things not gel with what I want in a library (and after all, I am a library user too), they seem to dilute what it even means to be a library.

Kathryn Greenhill, however, has a post that makes many aspects of library 2.0 something I could get behind.  It paints library 2.0 as a move away from the purported days-gone-by librarian shusher model (did anyone ever really get shushed?  I never did and I’m not a particularly quiet soul) and toward an era where librarians have control of their catalogue software (thus creating scope for things like user tagging, which are long overdue), library spaces accomodate collaborative and individual work, librarians seek feedback and listen to their users, and library services are available on the internet. Library usability, particularly in terms of online services, has a big part to play in this version of library 2.0 — and I am all for it — and apparently so is Swinburne, because we are doing many of these things already.

The big risk of library 2.0 is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; trying so hard to be everything to everyone that libraries are no longer libraries.  The big opportunity is providing increasingly relevant, increasingly user-friendly and increasingly useful spaces and services.  I think the way forward is to get off the bandwagon — the term library 2.0 is so overused as to be meaningless — and at least in Swinburne’s case, to keep doing what we are doing — listening to our users, and providing the best responses we can in a library context.

The idea behind Digg is interesting enough, get a community of people rating and commenting on news. Like any other community, Digg has its norms and social mores, unfortunately, however, they are not my social norms or mores. As per the 23 things, I signed up to Digg, and let the links roll in (and they certainly did roll — at last count I had 209 unread Digg links in my feed reader). Anecdotally, most of what Digg is feeding me is either techtips (most of them to do with the iPhone) or college boy humour (’10 ways to get kinky in the kitchen’, ‘look what happens when some girl tries to eat a tablespoon of cinnamon’, ‘catfight in the girls locker’ room…that sort of thing). I haven’t done a watertight analysis of this, but on first second and third glance, it seems to be fairly accurate. In fact, the most interesting thing Digg has presented me with is this Stephen Pinker article about swearing (be warned, this paper includes explicit examples of bad language), which piqued an old interest in socio- and psycholinguistics.

Not only is Digg full of college boy humour and tech-tips, I have also had the rather uncomfortable experience of someone I don’t know becoming my fan, claiming he likes what I am doing on Digg (which is precisely nothing). I know this is part of social networking, but on a site that already feels as hostile as Digg, someone being my fan is downright creepy.

So why is Digg the way it is? What has shaped the community? Part of the issue here is that Digg reflects the wider online community, men use the internet more often than women, and for longer. Moreover, younger people (PDF) are more likely to engage in social activities on the web — so young men are likely to be the primary users of a service like Digg because they are the primary users of social services online.

Having said that, Digg sublty encourages this demographic trend with its user interface. When I signed up, I was asked to choose my gender (which actually should be irrelevant on a site like Digg, but I assume they’re selling my eyeballs to an advertiser and gender matters there). The problem is not actually being asked my gender, the problem is the options I was offered: ‘Fellow’ and ‘Bird’. This is an example of where relying on fun to create a good user experience can be really risky: some people would find this fun, but I find the suggestion that males are ‘fellows’ (which has associations of jolly-goodness and even academia) and females are birds (near-brainless, decorative and flighty) pretty insulting–imagine, for example, that the options were ‘ladies’ and ‘roosters’ (or some synonym thereof).

This gender-naming slight is not the only thing about Digg that may discourage women, though: The main topics on Digg are ‘World & Business’, ‘Technology‘, ‘Science‘, ‘Entertainment’, ‘Gaming‘, ‘Sports‘, ‘Offbeat News’ and ‘Comedy Videos’, four of which are traditionally male dominated, and none of which are traditionally female dominated (I’m not going to get into whether things should be male or female dominated, I’m only talking about things as they are). If a news item you are interested in posting doesn’t fit into a Digg category, you are not welcome to post it to Digg.

These are just two of a number of ways Digg works to bias their user base further in favour of the typical internet user — young and male, and the popularity contest nature of Digg means that this culture is self-reinforcing. To be honest, though, whatever Digg wants to do with their user base is fine, provided they are aware they are doing it. It does mean, however, that this will not be a way I get my news in the future (as the 23 Things task suggested I might). I might occasionally visit and read the music section, which has many interesting articles about copyright, but I am certainly deleting my account, and unsubscribing from the RSS feed — Digg is not for me (clearly some of my colleagues feel the same way — see here, here and here), and the culture there makes that abundantly clear.

After reading Tom’s great post about blogging anonymously versus blogging with your real name (which I commented on with many of the links in this post), I thought I would explain why I am blogging with my real name for 23 things.

Not too long ago I went to a seminar presented by (among others) social technology researcher danah boyd, and she talked about managing your online identity by putting material up that you want to be found (she has also blogged about it). Now, as a techie I’m pretty aware of my online presence, and I do a vanity search “just to see what is out there” every few months. I even did a vanity search on my first name and my soon-to-be husband’s surname in an attempt to sway my decision about whether to change my name or not (I still haven’t decided). But with this blog, I decided I would (instead of the passive, reactive approach I have been taking until now) be pro-active about my online identity, and write material that, if found by (for example) a prospective employer would demonstrate my skills in and my passion for usability.

Now, I am pretty lucky, my name is relatively common, and there are at least two people (an opera singer and a microbiologist) with my name who have a large web presence. Nonetheless, I thought pretty carefully about whether I would really put my name on this blog, because once it is sucked up by Google, this web presence can be around for a long time even if I decide to delete my blog (especially if people link to it with my name). Having my name on this blog means I won’t post about anything controversial that is outside the usability sphere, and that my language and demeanour will remain professional (though I try to strike a balance and actually have a personality too). If I had wanted to post anything personal (like music reviews) or controversial (like political opinions) I would have created an anonymous (or more correctly pseudonymous) blog (and actually, because I like to write, I do have a blog for stuff like that, and it is pseudonymous). It was helpful to read a recent discussion of anonymity in the library world, Annoyed Librarian, Meredith Farkas and Morgan Wilson really cemented my decision for me with their comments on anonymity.

So how is this usability related or making anyone’s life simpler? Well, by having a professional blog with my real name, I am working towards establishing an online presence so I don’t have to do the vanity searches quite so often. However, were I to stir up too much trouble on this blog, and make myself unpopular, Google’s cache could make my life very un-simple indeed. Using your real name in anything online is worth considering carefully, and if you have any doubt, it is probably best to use a name that is either made up, or not your whole name.