Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal Designer,Yahoo! Inc.

Thanks, Luke for doing this follow-up interview to the Usability 2.0 Event at the WebGuild on April 11, 2007. This is such a huge subject area that I thought it warranted a follow-up one-on-one session.

Q: Although there are established design and usability best practices and standards, there are also varying standards within companies' definitions of good design and usability and the role design should play in the product development process. Some companies value form as well as function whereas others appear to value function only. Is form still a valuable element in usability?:

A: There are two strongly interconnected ways to utilize form: personality & visual organization.

Personality–or visceral design if you prefer-is defined by the subjective reaction people have when viewing a product. It’s the combination of fonts, colors, images, shapes, and patterns that tells you which laundry detergent is tough on stains and which one provides a delicate touch. Though this aspect of form predominantly enforces a brand message for products it can also have an influence on usability. To substantiate that point, Don Norman has recently exposed research that indicates “attractive things work better”. To quote "When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn't it? Or at least feels like it does." So there’s a corollary between aesthetics and ease of use.

For many people, the role of visual design ends there as they only consider form for "making things pretty". As a result, they overlook the crucial role of visual organization.

Visual organization. (www.lukew.com/resources/articles/visible_narratives.html) is the deliberate prioritization of meaning within a visual design. It’s the process of applying the principles behind perception–how we make sense of what we see- to illuminate relationships between content and actions. Through applications of visual contrast, designers can communicate the steps required to complete a task, the relationships between information, or the hierarchy between interface elements. Since the majority of people are only able to interact with a Web application through its presentation layer, visual organization is a key component for successful interface designs. It essentially tells people how to use things. Personality, on the other hand, tends to focus on why.

Q: In the US, we have a lot of users online and as a result, a key initiative is to drive usage versus users. How does usability play a part in driving usage?

A: Usability is part of a fairly broad set of considerations that determine usage. So we need to think of it’s role in the context of making products and services that are not only usable but accessible, findable, desirable, credible, useful, and more.

Obviously making it clear how to engage with experiences that people consider desirable, credible, or useful is likely to increase usage. So applying usability principles to reduce barriers to engagement is a worthwhile endeavor.

Q: Most companies, including Yahoo, are proliferating their web prescience onto a wap platform in addition to the traditional desktop platform. What are your best practices for Wap usability?

A: I’m going to broaden this to cover designing for mobile devices as I think the discussion goes beyond WAP technology. The basic principles in the mobile space are the same as any medium just very strongly influenced by context. In most cases today that means smaller screens, slow connectivity, challenging input devices (keypad typing for instance), location awareness, and device integration.

Small screens and slow connections require you to rigorously prioritize the content and actions available to mobile users. Large pages with superfluous content are a sure fire way to turn mobile users away from your site. Clear labels and information architectures that don’t go too deep are also good ways to avoid costing users clicks and unnecessary downloads.

Challenging input devices require designers to consider how content and actions can be browsed using keypads–via numerical lists-or simple up/down and left/right actions. Location awareness opens up enormous possibilities for experiences relevant to where you are or who is near you. But this information tends to be regarded as quite personal, so there are privacy issues around how relevant location-aware content gets surfaced to people.

Lastly, device integration is the need to account for a broader product ecosystem. Mobile devices are part of a content relationship between desktop computers, music players, televisions, and more. Getting these devices to interact seamlessly has been a considerable challenge for both engineers and designers.

Q: What are some of your: best practices for usability testing, biggest bangs for your usability dollar, or usability sins?

A: For any type of usability testing, I’d say a crucial best practice is objectivity. Being able to observe what you are seeing people do without a subjective viewpoint is one of the traits I’ve come to admire most in usability professionals. Part of that is being open to new insights. If you have a predetermined point of view, you’re likely to mostly see what you assume you will beforehand.

I’ve always been a fan of RITE (rapid iterative testing) and triangulation (or perhaps a better term is cross-fertilization) of multiple data sources. RITE testing gives you the ability to quickly adapt to issues and opportunities being seen as testing goes on. Data cross-fertilization gives you both qualitative and quantitative information, which paints a fuller picture of what’s working. For example, live site testing may tell you what people are doing on your site but it won’t tell you why. Lab testing, on the other hand may tell you why people may do things but it may not be an accurate predictor of large-scale behavior. When combined, however, these and other techniques can paint a fuller picture.

As far as usability sins, there are a couple scenarios that come up frequently in testing: discoverability and complete cognition. I bring up discoverability because usability testing is often used to evaluate the effectives of specific Web application features and a common finding is that the feature being tested is not discoverable. Most times, I believe that is to be expected. People do not experience features in isolation, they experience them in the context of tasks and goals. As such testing the discoverability of a feature for feature’s sake may lead to make decisions that don’t take the full context of product experience into account.

Complete cognition on the other hand, is the expectation that people need to understand exactly how they accomplished a task. A more relevant measure is how they did or did not accomplish the task they set out to do. Often, it’s unreasonable to assume people will completely understand how and why something works. So considering that a failing of the design doesn’t help address actual usability (usage) issues.

Q: There are a lot of elements that go into a successful site design that are not only about what we see but also more qualitative factors such as how we think and feel as we navigate a site. How do you test such elements?

A: When it comes time to evaluate the more "subjective" aspects of an application, qualitative analysis tends to take over. For example, in a CHI2004 paper, the Microsoft User Experience Team outlined the methods they used to gather "structured user input on the visual design" of a product. These included design mark-up, a semantic design-description task, a statement rating task, a semantic desirability group card sort task, and a modified focus group discussion. Each of these methods relied on qualitative data from participants.

But I’ve always been of the mind that quantitative data may be a more meaningful metric for visual design than qualitative analysis. Judging the effectiveness of visual designs based on what participants accomplish (and how they accomplish it) could potentially allow us to evaluate the subconscious processing of visual information that shapes user behavior. Asking users "do you like option a or option b?" rarely provides any insightful data.

Q: There was recently a Harvard Report titled "Defeating Feature Fatigue", that talked about consumer sites that load up on features and what they called feature bloat or featuritis. They found that even though consumers know that products with more features are harder to use, they initially choose high-feature models which is good for business initially. But once consumers have actually worked with a product, usability starts to matter more to them than capability. There’re lots of consumer internet plays that are guilty of this. How do you balance the need to be feature rich with usability?

A: There’s certainly an interesting balance between customers and product offerings. As you mentioned, people tend to make their purchasing decisions based on feature quantity but their retention decisions based on actual usage, which of course can be negatively impacted by feature overload.

A similar paradox occurs when the people that love using your product ask for it to do more. After all, there’s an endless pool of user needs to meet. “Wouldn’t it be cool if it also did…?” Companies that pride themselves on listening to their customers are often quick to respond to these requests because they have pressure to continue growing their businesses. But before long the same customers who were asking for new features are the ones complaining about too much complexity resulting from feature overload.

That said, I do think there are ways to balance the need for “feature currency” at the point of sale and product usability. Apple –who is renowned for simple product design- does use feature counts to market their products. OS X Tiger, for example boasted "200+ new features" (www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/). But Apple’s products don’t surface all of these features at once. In fact, some argue that many of their product features are too hidden for average consumers to discover. In many instances, I think that’s ok.

As I mentioned when talking about usability sins earlier, fixating on feature-level discoverability is a recipe for complexity. In many cases, requiring people to exert some effort to access a feature they need is preferable to exposing it to lots of people who don’t need it. The key is to not let individual features overwhelm the larger system. Companies that divide the management of their products by features run the risk of losing sight of the big picture that holds all their features together.

Q: Have we gotten any better at improving the usability of our sites for international users? And, is web 2.0 aiding or impeding site usability for international audiences?

A: From the international studies I’ve seen, good usability tends to function across borders. The same underlying principles of perception govern how we make sense of what we see across cultures and Web conventions are pretty quickly adopted globally. In fact, many times I’ve seen general principles proven to be more successful than specifically localized layouts or interaction designs. That’s said there are a few things to consider when designing global products.

First – and perhaps most obviously - is language. Right to left vs. left to right reading, word lengths –French and Dutch tends to be almost twice as long as English-, labels, specific marketing messages applicable to different cultures and geographic locations, and so on. To give you a sense of how much of an impact language can have on Web design, I had a series on Functioning Form about Japanese Typography online that included letter spacing, presentation, character selection and more (www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?111).

Local context also plays an important role. What types of infrastructure exists in a particular geography? Are people primarily accessing the Web from shared Internet Cafes, on mobile phones, or through super fast broadband connections? How do people describe or reference their surroundings and relationships? Do they use train stations to describe locations, street names, or landmarks? Are there cultural metaphors that can be leveraged to

Of these two considerations, most Web companies spend the minimum amount of effort required for language localization and almost no effort on local contextualization when launching global products. I don’t think that’s changed much with the advent of social software and pure online services. So I’d say we have mostly the same issues now.

Q: One shameless self-promotion.

A: I’m currently authoring a book for Rosenfeld Media titled Web Form Design Best Practices that covers Web form usability, visual design, and interaction design culled from live to site analytics, usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and best practice surveys. In e-commerce, social software, and Web applications forms play a pivotal role by completing sales, signing up new customers, and enabling content manipulation. Web Form Design Best Practices outlines ways to optimize these key interactions.

You can stay up date on the book's progress and idea development by subscribing to the RSS feed from the book-in-progress site (www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/).

Yahoo's CTO, Farzad Nazem, Resigns

Farzad Nazem, Yahoo's CTO for the past 11 years has called it quits. Couple of weeks ago Susan Decker quit as Yahoo's CFO. An SEC, filing outlines that Farzad will not we able to work for a competitor such as Google or Microsoft for 3 years nor can he solicit or contract Yahoo employees.

Yahoo CFO Out: Goal Not To Be No. 1 In Search

Susan Decker, the former CFO of Yahoo has been replaced by Blake Jorgensen. He will begin his new job on June 4, 2007. Susan was famous for saying that "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search." and that is precisely the plan the company has been sticking to. Here is the press release from Yahoo.

Featuritis

There was recently a Harvard Report titled "Defeating Feature Fatigue", that talked about consumer sites that load up on features in what they called feature bloat or featuritis. They found that even though consumers know that products with more features are harder to use, they initially choose high-feature models which is good for business initially but has an adverse effect later as once consumers have actually worked with a product, usability starts to matter more to them than capability.

There’re lots of consumer internet plays that are guilty of this. It is a very common dilemma of striking the right balance between giving users enough and potentially giving them too much. From a business perspective, companies try to one-up each other by offering more in competing for sometimes fickle users. We sometimes want to pull out all the stops burying ourselves in feature creep, and lose sight of the real value being offered. So, how do you balance the need to provide adequate feature set with usability? The answer might surprise some. "The authors' analytical model guides companies toward a happy middle ground: maximizing the net present value of the typical customer's profit stream. The authors also advise companies to build simpler products, help consumers learn which products suit their needs, develop products that do one thing very well, and design market research in which consumers use actual products or prototypes."

Google searches web's dark side

One in 10 web pages contains malicious code that could infect a user's PC. Researchers at Google scrutinized 4.5 million pages to and 10% or 450,000 were capable of launching so-called "drive-by downloads", sites that install malicious code, such as spyware, without a user's knowledge, and a further 700,000 pages were thought to contain code that could compromise a user's computer.

Drive-by downloads are an increasingly common way to infect a computer or steal sensitive information. They usually consist of malicious programs that automatically install when a user visits a booby-trapped website.

"To entice users to install malware, adversaries employ social engineering," wrote Google researcher Niels Provos.

"The user is presented with links that promise access to 'interesting' pages with explicit pornographic content, copyrighted software or media. A common example are sites that display thumbnails to adult videos."

Some downloads, alter bookmarks, install unwanted toolbars or change the start page of a browser. However, increasingly, criminals are using drive-bys to install keyloggers that steal login and password information.

Other pieces of malicious code hijack a computer turning it into a "bot", a remotely controlled PC.

Drive-by downloads represent a shift away from traditional methods of infecting a computer, such as spam and email attachments.

The vast majority exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to install themselves.

Google will start to identify all web pages on the internet that could be malicious.
Google, part of the StopBadware coalition, already warns users if they are about to visit a potentially harmful website, displaying a message that reads "this site may harm your computer" next to the search results.

"Marking pages with a label allows users to avoid exposure to such sites and results in fewer users being infected," the researchers wrote. This is similar to the browser install produced by McAfee called SiteAdvisor, which alters users to spyware, spam, viruses and online scams. SiteAdvisor, alerts users of web site's safety by assigning color codes next to the severity of the threat posted. However, the constant pop-up that alerts users of a sites threat level can get annoying and time consuming.

The Google report also identified the other methods by which criminals inject malicious code on to innocent web pages.

1. Spam email - are a common way to infect a computer. It found that the code was often contained in those parts of the website not designed or controlled by the website owner, such as banner adverts and widgets.

2. Widgets - are small programs that may, for example, display a calendar on a web page or a web traffic counter. These are often downloaded from third-party sites. The rise of web 2.0 and user-generated content gave criminals other channels, or vectors, of attack, it found. For example, postings in blogs and forums that contain links to images or other content could unwittingly infect a user.

You're a Nobody Unless You Google Well

If your name does not come up on Google you are nobody according to an article published by the Wall Street Journal.

Today, employers frequently Google their candidate prior to even calling. Interviewers often search to see if what a candidate say on their resume could be verified online. More than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by executive networking firm ExecuNet. Nearly 40% of individuals have used search engines to look up friends or acquaintances with whom they'd lost touch, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN unit.

Parents to be are turning to Google to find unique names for their children. They explain they want their children to stand out. Google, John Smith and you will get 209,000,000 searchresults and as people flood the web this is going to be a growing problem.

To increase visibility musicians are turning to unique sites like Gruuve where they can be found. Eg. a search for "U2" on Google is getting very noise but a search for "U2" on Gruuve brings us the band.

For web professionals WebGuild is building its own version on an online directory. People in the web profession can add themselves to the directory and use it as an online biography which they could provide to reporters, employers, for speaking engagements and more.

Yahoo Auctions & Yahoo Photos To Shut Down

Yahoo has told users it will shut down its auction site in U.S. and Canada. This is the second service the Yahoo is shutting this month.

Yahoo posted a message on it website saying the service will no longer accept new auction lists from June 3. The last day to bid or buy goods and services on the auction site is June 16.

On Friday, Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network Division, said in a company statement: "We are making great strides in our ongoing efforts to align Yahoo's resources and focus on core strategic priorities."

According to audience measurement firm comScore Inc., online auction leader eBay Inc. accounted for more than 94 percent of online auctions activity among U.S. Web users last week. Online retail giant Amazon.com Inc.'s U.S. auction site accounted for one-third of a percentage point, while Yahoo's auctions held only an 0.2 percent share.

"It comes with little surprise given Yahoo's advertising relationship with eBay, and eBay's massive dominance of the auction category," Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott wrote in a blog post.

A year ago, eBay and Yahoo announced a strategic alliance to cooperate on a range of services in their core U.S markets.

Google Analytics Gets New Look

Google announced a redesign of the popular Google Analytics application. The new redesign will make the analysis even more accessible and easy to use while improving the data reporting capabilities of the Web site usage monitoring service.

Products like Google Analytics continue to rise in importance as companies strive to understand how people arrive at their Web sites and what they do once they are there.

Knowing that helps webmasters make their sites more effective tools for displaying online ads, providing sales leads, and generating e-commerce transactions.

According to Brett Crosby, Senior Manager, Google Analytics, "The overall goal of this upgrade is to make the product more intuitive to use and its data clearer and easier to digest so that it can be used effectively to make business decisions."

Brett will be giving an indepth workings of the product at the upcoming Searchnomics Conference as part of his talk on Using Analytics To Improve Your Marketing Efforts.

iGoogle

On the heels of iPod, iPhone, and iMac, the power of "i" is once again apparent in iGoogle. About a week ago, Google announced the launch of the latest incarnation of its Personalized Homepage newly re-branded as iGoogle clearly with the emphasis being on I, me, and you; hence, the personalization aspect.

iGoogle allows you to create an alternative to the classic pared down Google homepage customized with content gadgets or "stuff" ranging from jokes, games, and videos to top news stories. Or, if you don't see something that tickles your fancy, you can create and share your very own gadget of family photos, a video channel, a daily does of you, and your fave lists. You can also select a theme for your personalized homepage and re-arrange your gadgets by dragging and dropping for optimal placement. Adding, editing, and deleting tabs allows for the ability to create multiple content specific homepages.

iGoogle is all about the power of "i" and users. It's another example of what Web 2.0 affords us...the ability to create user-generated content and to self publish. It's about putting the power and control into the hands of users.

As Yahoo puts it in MyYahoo, "Imagine all your favorite things on one page. That's My Yahoo!". Although I must admit, I didn't find the Yahoo interface to be as intuitive and easy to use. It probably even has more features than iGoogle (I didn't stick around long enough to find out) but it just wasn't as easy to use. MyMSN gave me a horizontal scrollbar, the colors options were too heavy, it wasn't clear how I would delete a content box, and the drag and drop functionality was kludgey at best.

Usability 2.0

The WebGuild's April 11 event on Usability 2.0 was a highly informative and entertaining session. It was also well attended with upwards of 300 people present. The panelists provided a wealth of useful and practical information coupled with great anecdotes. Panelists included Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal Designer, Yahoo! Inc., Jon Wiley, User Experience Designer, Google, Inc., Sean Kane, Director, User Interface Engineering, Netflix, and moderated by myself. I will be conducting follow-up interviews with both Luke and Jon in the weeks ahead, so stay tuned for that.

Watch the video below!

Sir Martin Says Google Is Frienemy

I was at "The Future of Advertising Conference" at Stanford and Sir Martin Sorrell, Chairman, WPP, the largest advertising holding company shared some interesting stats about the advertising business.

1. WPP has a market share of approximately 25% of the global ad business, annual billings of $60 Billion and yet only $200 M of that is with Google.
2. Google's revenues are approximately $11 Billion and at $200 M, WPP is one of Google's largest customers. So Google's tail is very very long and they are just getting started.
3. He went on to say that Google is a FRIENEMY - Google is your friend in the short term and enemy in the long term. His reasoning was Google wants access to large advertising account, that they do not have relationships with and that is where the friendship begins.
4. There was little mention of Microsoft or Yahoo and it understandable as their respective foot prints in this space is still considered baby steps.

On May 16, 2007, the WebGuild will be having an event of The Future of Online Advertising with all the heavy weights including Google. The panel will share insight into the future of online advertising from several perspectives of paramount importance to web professionals, seos, sems or search engine marketers, web analytics professionals, online merchants, venture capitals, entrepreneurs and anyone that uses a website to acquire customers, service customers or monetize customers. There are still a few spots left. If you miss this then there is always Searchnomics, which delves deep into search advertising and search & marketplaces and must attend for all web professinal.

Why Attend Searchnomics 2007

If you are a web marketing professional i.e. a UX professional, SEO/M, analytics professional, developer, designer, or producer, this conference is a great opportunity to hear from thought leaders in the industry on how to best leverage, market, and monetize your websites for maximum ROI using search. Learn how to create search engine friendly designs, search engine strategies, tools, techniques, tactics, best practices, analytics, trends, and more.

There will also be awards presented to the best search engine sites in various categories such as Best Overall Search Engine, Best Overall User Experience, Best Emerging Search Engine, etc. The judging criteria is based on the following: content, authority, navigation, design, accessibility. The winners are determined by a panel of judges and votes received by users.

There're a lot of great keynotes including Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, Google Inc., and speakers, and cross-section of companies. The conference is on June 27, 2007 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Check it out for yourself!