Essentials to Web Design & Coding

This is a must watch - happy Thursday!

Adobe Stock Photos Service To Be Discontinued

As of April 1, the Adobe® Stock Photos royalty-free image service will be discontinued. I received an email yesterday from Adobe announcing this. The service was introduced in May 2005 as part of CS2 and allow CS users to search image libraries to purchase royalty-free images. The reason being cited for the discontinuation of the service is that "Adobe has decided to concentrate its efforts in other areas".

The photos which are part of this service are from the stock collections of the following providers: Amana, BananaStock, Blend Images, Brand X Pictures, Comstock, Creatas, Digital Archive Japan, Digital Vision, Glow Images, Goodshoot, Image Source, Ingram Publishing, IPN Relay, IT Stock International, Masterfile, Photodisc, PhotoObjects.net, Photosindia, Purestock, Redchopsticks, Stockbyte, Tetra Images, and Thinkstock. Here is a listing of the types of images you can find on these site.

Microsoft High Fashion PCs

The next gen of Microsoft PCs is shaping up to be fashionable. Yes, you heard right! Microsoft is staying au current recognizing that laptops are now more than just a useful device but more so a trendy fashion accessory. The company is coming out with high-fashion PCs and held a fashion PC show at CES to showcase some of their designs.

And, they are not the only ones. Sony, ASUS, Lenovo and Gateway are also in on the action and are coming out with more "pretty" computers. OEMs are taking a page from fashion designers and are blinging out laptop cases with anything from cow fur, aluminum, leather and carbon fiber. Apple hardware has long been very sleek and cool, thereby, attracting a lot of younger users and maybe even bucking this trend; whereas, Microsoft's has been more enterprise and less focussed on aesthetic design. This is a step in the right direction for Microsoft in capturing a younger consumer market and moving the needle a little in terms of their brand perception.

Web Strategy: How to Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website

Traditional Web Marketing needs to evolve, and this post intends to kick start the next generation.

What’s a corporate web site?
It’s the domain they use after every advertisement where you can learn more about a company, ya know it, anycompany.com.

But we’re tired of the corporate website and all it’s happy marketing speak, stock photos of smart looking dudes or minority women crowded around the computer raving about your product, the positive press release, the happy customer testimonials, the row of executive portraits, the donations your corporate made to disaster relief, the one-sided view never ends.

While some of your traffic may be going up on your website, it’s not indicative of how corporate websites are being used. Analytics don’t tell us why people go to your site, and it may not be for the reason you want them to.

[The corporate website is an unbelievable collection of hyperbole, artificial branding, and pro-corporate content. As a result, trusted decisions are being made on other locations on the internet]
Why is your corporate website irrelevant?

Marketing has shifted, it’s no longer on two domains
Many web marketers are under the impression that the battles are only fought within Google search results and on the corporate domain. In reality, marketing has spread to many other areas where conversations occur: social networks, rating sites, chat rooms, and even blogs. I dedicated a whole post to why marketing is not on two domains only.

Decisions are made before they go to the corporate website
Yesterday, at lunch with a college student, she told me that her peers get ideas about product decisions on consumer rating sites, and from their peers. They use instant messaging, facebook, (and other social networks) and rarely directly type in a domain name to corporate website. If this holds true, then it’s assumed that prospects make decisions on other websites BEFORE they come to the corporate website to get factual information.

Factual information
Legally, corporations need to disclose product details, this is a strong case for the use of the corporate websites. However in my continued conversation with the Generation Y, she continued to tell me that she used corporate websites to get core feature stats and pricing, but that’s after she made a decision based upon her peer feedback to visit the corporate site.

The future, and how to stay relevant:

Websites are created with customers
This is disruptive, but I predict that the most relevant future websites will have customers building websites alongside employees. The most effective websites will contain a balanced point of view of both the product team and customers –even if they have qualms with the product.

Unfiltered customer testimonials will appear
You’ll no longer only be the only one publishing to your website, customers, prospects, and other members of the community will have direct access to publish on your website. Sure, there will be controls to make sure the content is somewhat factual or reviewed, but it will be obvious to many that the only voice won’t be the marketing one.

Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace. We know from research that the highest degree of trust comes from those ‘like me’, a savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism, the goal? To take that feedback, and demonstrate in public how you will improve your offerings in plain view. Case study: Dell has done this with IdeaStorm.

Your website will be a Community Resource
This means that you’ll put your customers first, No Really, I mean it. This means providing analysis of not just yourself but to competitors as well, this means that you’ll link to competitors. Crazy? I did this myself at my previous role as a community manager, I created a wiki for customers that linked to competitors, and it made me more relevant.

[The corporate website of the future will be a credible source of opinion and fact, authored by both the corporation and community. The result? A true first-stop community resource where information flows for better products and services]

Outcomes
Customers will make your site the first place to go for information, trust will increase, you may be able to build better products and services with real-time customer feedback, and most importantly, you’ll be a community resource that will help you meet your customer needs faster.

Visualize
We’ll start to see customers help write the corporate newsletter, feeds pulling in industry blogs, media (audio and video) customers rating and ranking and voting for what features they want improved, product teams working directly with customers in real-time, and customers self-supporting each other.

Written by and reprinted with the permission of Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

Web Accessibility Could Be California Law

Target is being targetted for allegedly forcing users to navigate the web blindly. A lawsuit filed in '06 claims that Target has violated the California Disabilities Persons Act in that its website, Target.com, does not provide full and equal access to blind users.

The Target suit claims that alternate text and accessible image maps are missing which screen readers depend on to read through the page content and vocalize it to the user; and, the website requires the use of a mouse to complete certain functions. The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) who, in part, filed this suit has also filed and won similar cases against America Online, Priceline.com, and Ramada.com.

The judge has now granted class-action status to the Target lawsuit which means that all blind people in the U.S. who have tried to access Target.com can join in the lawsuit. The judge also went a step further stating that under California state's Disabled Rights Law, websites are required to be accessible. There are apparently about 10,000 people in California who use reading software to access the internet.

This is a precedent setting case with far reaching implications for all websites. This has the potential to create new requirements for companies, new jobs, added development needs, new QA needs, retro-fitting of sites, new costs, etc. For companies with rich internet Web 2.0 apps using Ajax, this will be a bit of a speed bump for them as they will need to web accessify their apps which could slow them down. Ajax has, in the past, gotten a bit of a bad wrap for accessibility. Already, companies with government contracts are required to make their sites accessible. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has some information on this stuff and other requirements around S.508 compliance. I believe Yahoo is one company which actually has a disabled person on their UI/dev team whom they check the accessibility of their sites against. Perhaps, content management systems (CMS's) will be required to make alt text required for images inputted by content contributors.

Here are some tips for making your site accessible:
1. For flash objects, adding a 'noembed' tag with a text version of the content of the flash movie is one way around this. Macromedia has some guidelines for making flash accessible.
2. Adding text transcripts of videos are also a good practice.
3. Testing your site using a text based browser such as Lynx or turning off the graphics in your browser's advanced internet options to see if you can still read and navigate a site without graphics is another good test. People that are visually impaired will sometimes upload their own stylesheets which override the site stylesheet to help them read your site better. Many sites use fixed font sizes versus percentages which broswers such as IE do not allow you to adjust but Firefox does. Other sites have a text size adjuster for pages.

The web has predominantly been cowboy country governed by few laws. This is an example of an offline world law being enforced onto the online world. More and more internet specific laws are being created but hopefully, they won't quell innovation.

30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of

Here is an overly exhaustive but nonetheless useful list of 30 usability issues to be aware of as described in Smashing Mag.

-7±2 Principle
-2-Second-Rule
-3-Click-Rule
-80/20 Rule (The Pareto principle)
-Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design
-Fitts’ Law
-Inverted Pyramid
-Satisficing
-Baby-Duck-Syndrome
-Banner-Blindness
-Cliffhanger-Effect (Zeigarnik-Effect)
-Gestalt principles of form perception
-The Self-Reference Effect
-Eye-Tracking
-Fold
-Foveal viewport (Foveal area)
-Gloss
-Graceful Degradation (Fault-tolerance)
-Granularity
-Hotspot
-Legibility
-Minesweeping
-Mystery-Meat Navigation (MMN)
-Physical consistency
-Progressive Enhancement (PE)
-Readability
-User-centered design (UCD)
-Vigilance (sustained attention)
-Walk-Up-And-Use Design
-Wireframe

Read article.

Interview with Chuck Villard, Developer, VeriSign

I recently interviewed Chuck Villard II, über Web Developer, at VeriSign whom I worked with on the re-design of the VeriSign.com homepage. Chuck and I have a healthy mutual respect and admiration for each other's expertise and crafts which makes for a highly synergistic relationship, crucial in any project, but especially so for a high-visibility project such as this. I thought it would be beneficial to share some of what went into this re-design from a development perspective, which some of you may find useful in your own re-designs. So here goes.

Q: What were some of your goals in the development of the page?

A: I would say my goals fit into two groups - team and personal. As a development team, we wanted to have a home page that grabbed the user's attention and presented them with content in a more attractive and interactive manner. We also wanted to be able to continue to present one unified home page globally, across all our sites.

Personally, I wanted to challenge myself to create a homepage that was cross-browser compatible and standards compliant, all while taking advantage of some of today’s hot topics like DHTML and CSS.

Q: What, if any, were some of the challenges you encountered with the development and why?

A: I think the biggest challenge was trying to create an interactive homepage in a content driven business. I think this actually tends to be the most challenging aspect of development on a regular basis. Our development team wants to be challenged and push our own limits, however, when content is king it can be quite difficult. I feel Web 2.0 practices are about finding a sweet spot. That spot where you can make an eye catching web page but still be able to speak to the customer and not distract them.

Q: The new home page is a deviation from the previous iteration of the page from both a Web 2.0 design as well as functionality perspective. Can you describe the Web 2.0 technologies you used and how?

A: As we were preparing for the home page project we talked about how to present the content and how we could come up with a sexier look. The page was created using XHTML for content and CSS for the presentation.

To keep the news headlines concise and clean we used a DHTML news ticker. Following along that line we used DHTML for a hover system that allows the user to view all of the products and services without taking up too much real estate. This also worked out excellently for SEO purposes.

We have a flash piece that tells our story, but our biggest change is the top level navigation. We are now using a DHTML hover menu system that gives users quicker access to the sub-level pages of content that they may be looking for.

Q: Standards based development practices has gotten a lot of web airtime recently. How did you incorporate coding best practices into your programming of this page?

A: It’s tough at times trying to keep in mind that every browser displays differently, and there isn’t just one major internet browser anymore. Attempting to comply with W3C standards is often more of a challenge when it may not benefit an organization financially. The first few times trying to use this process can be, developmentally, time consuming. The time spent on it may cut into other projects or budgets but the benefits are worthwhile when perfected, especially when considering scalability.

Standards have been a passion of mine as of late, and despite technological issues we may have internally, I wanted to implement a 100% compliant home page. When I started development, I laid out the content in XHTML before thinking about what a border might look like or what size the text might be. After this process I started to create the CSS, laying out the content and checking and making adjustments for major browsers issues. After the major page is laid out, we add all the fancy stuff.

Q: What steps were taken programmatically to improve the web accessibility of the page for users utilizing assistive technologies to view it?

A: Along with the separation of content and presentation, making sure that the page degrades well without CSS and Javascript was a focus. Part of my development process is to also use a text based browser to try and make sure all users are considered when putting the page together.

Q: AJAX has gotten somewhat of a bad rap for encumbering accessibility. What has been your experience with this and what would you advise on this issue?

A: I think some people see flashy, slick interfaces or applications and automatically think "Ajax". However, this can just be the presentation which is mostly DHTML. Ajax refers mainly to the data requests behind the scenes without those pesky page reloads. My thought process is; use DHTML and Ajax where it’s not going to greatly affect content and where it just makes life easier. There is a great article over at StandardsSchmandards.com that talks about some of these issues.

Q: Newsweek has declared 2007 the "Year of the Widget". What are your thoughts on this as it relates to the widgetization of the web and/or future revs of the homepage?

A: With the addition of services to the web, and user generated content, widgets and mash-ups are the next big thing in the future of the internet. You can view the stock market, the weather, the news and have them available to your PC, phone, and now on your TV. At this point I am not sure how VeriSign’s home page will fit into the mix, but we are constantly trying new things to enhance the usability of our site.

Q: What are some of your favorite developer resource sites?

A: With the introduction of sites like iGoogle, I use RSS feeds to read all the great articles in one place. I regularly read Ajaxian and A List Apart (great CSS resources), as well as, the truly Geek site - Slashdot.

Q: If you had to do it all over again, what, if anything, would you do differently?

A: I don’t feel I would do anything differently; however, I would love to have other resources like PHP available to make a more dynamic home page. We are working on a more dynamic environment while keeping security in mind, which is time consuming. At this point, I just look forward to the next redesign.

Google AdSense for Your Mobile Sites

You can now place ads on your mobile websites using Google AdSense. It's an internet marketer's dream. AdSense has traditionally been used on the desktop platform only allowing site owners to display related advertising on their site using a PPC model. The mobile edition is a limited availability beta release. It's no secret that the mobile market is hot with increasingly more people owning cell phones and an ever growing number of mobile websites being created to support this sales opportunity. AdSense is paving the way for the monetization of this new marketing channel by covering the bases on another of the much touted three screen views.

On the user experience side, this can equally be a designer and user's worst nightmare. Although screen sizes are increasing in size, there is still a very limited amount of screen real estate to work within and now with more content, albeit ads-y content, which may or may not be welcome by users. It's an interesting challenge both in the decision to serve ads and the usability implications. The placement of the ads are unlikely to fall in the right column as is traditionally the case on the desktop platform; they are more likely to fall towards the bottom of the page above the site footer with some differentiation between the main site content and what are essentially ads. There are apparently character and line limitations.

In terms of development, website requirements are that "webpages must be written in a mobile markup language and developed with a server-side scripting language such as PHP; AdSense for mobile ad code will only display ads on mobile-compliant webpages. Mobile Webpage Markup Languages: wml (WAP 1.x.), xhtml (WAP 2.0), chtml (imode, etc.)". (Source: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=71600&ctx=sibling)

Interview with Jon Wiley, User Experience Designer, Google Apps

I am an avid user and fan of Google Apps and judging by its growing popularity, I am certainly not alone on this. I recently had an opportunity to interview Jon Wiley, User Experience Designer, for Google Apps to gain some insight into this suite of apps. Jon was also recently a panelist at the Usability 2.0 Event at the WebGuild on April 11, 2007.

Q: You work on Google Apps. Can you tell the readers a little about it and what you do on Google Apps?

A: Google Apps is a collection of Google services such as Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Spreadsheets, and Talk, all bundled up as a white label product for businesses, schools, small groups, and ISPs. The Premier Edition is $50/user/year and the Standard and Education editions are free. I work on the sign up and payment interfaces, and parts of the administrator control panel interface. I also work with other designers and researchers to represent the needs of enterprise, SMB, ISP, and educational organizations when thinking about the experience of Google's diverse products and services.

Q: I think most people would point to Google Apps as an example of web, usability, and design 2.0 epitomized. Do you agree with this characterization and why or why not?

A: All of the services bundled with Google Apps certainly typify Web 2.0 applications. Google has long been an innovator in delivering powerful web applications via the browser. But we have only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible. Everyone who works on these applications has a hundred ideas to make them better. Our work is never done.

Q: One of the things I've noticed with Google Apps is that there is a little more attention placed on form in the design, notwithstanding function, compared to the uber simplicity of the google.com homepage. It still has the Google moniker but there is color, icons, and visual interest. Why this divergence, if you will? And what, if any, has been the impact on usability?

A: While the classic Google home page maintains a very simple appearance, we've recently given users more choices and the ability to customize their experience with iGoogle. It's true that our search interface is highly functional and that we've explored visual design more in our applications.

This divergence can be traced to where users spend time. Search connects users to the best results for their query as quickly as possible, and users do not spend a lot of time in search. Much more time is spent in applications like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Talk. The usability of these applications is enhanced through visual design. We want users to feel comfortable in our applications and it is there that investing in the visuals really pays off.

Q: Components of Google Apps such as Gmail, Talk, and Calendar are available for mobile access. Do you foresee Docs and Spreadsheets migrating to WAP as well? And if so, what would have to be different from the desktop version to ensure the usability of these apps on a WAP platform?

A: We want to make information universally accessible and useful. Providing access via mobile platforms goes towards fulfilling that first goal. Fulfilling the second, making it useful, is more complicated. Do people want to edit spreadsheets on their mobile phone or collaborate on documents? Perhaps they would rather just manage their documents, sharing them for instance. Or maybe the mobile context creates new possibilities for collaboration.

Q: Google Apps is localized for a number of countries and languages. How do you design for and test the usability for the various geographies and what are some of the differences encountered?

At a very tactical level, we strive to design interfaces which can work well in a variety of languages. Interfaces that scale and that make extensive use of CSS are easier to translate without breaking. If, from our research, we think a particular interface or workflow may be impacted by language or locale, we will organize user testing to help us understand and address those variances. At a more strategic level, Google has offices throughout the world. It is a lot easier to listen to your users if you are close to them.

Q: Tell us a little about your usability testing process.

For usability testing, which is a small part of our overall research program, we typically utilize labs on site to host users and present them with high fidelity prototypes of applications. We'll walk our users through a number of scenarios in order to gauge the usability of the interface. Occasionally, if the prototype is sufficiently deep, we will allow users to explore without any particular scenario in mind. Our process is an iterative one and we'll perform testing several times to improve the usability of the application.

Q: The target audiences for Google Apps are Small Business, Enterprise, Academia, and Families or Group. That's a pretty broad spectrum of users with varying needs and skill/experience levels. How do you create a suite of apps for multiple demographics and experience levels and still make it usable and stimulating for the everyone?

A: In terms of administrating these services for the organization, we work to identify the information and actions common to all of our customers and make those items readily visible and easily accessible. While the types of organizations served by Google Apps are quite diverse, their needs are often quite similar. Often, it is simply a matter of scale.

For the applications themselves, the spectrum of needs and diversity of users is greater. Nearly all Google applications begin their lives aimed squarely at the consumer market. Google excels at supporting large scale initiatives and we want to solve problems for the largest possible audience. This focus on solving problems for lots of people translates into highly useful applications. The world is full of software and devices with a wealth of solutions, maybe a tenth of which people actually use. We aim to include the features that most people will use a lot.

The rapid innovation of web applications in the consumer space has opened up a gap between the usability and usefulness of products in people's personal lives vs. the products and services offered by their employers and schools. Rather than look for feature-heavy products at home, they are seeking products that are easier to use and more useful in the workplace and the classroom. We're bridging that gap with Google Apps.

We also just launched a Partner Edition of Google Apps for ISPs.

Q: How are Web 2.0 technoligies such as AJAX being used in Google Apps?

A: I've been building web pages since 1995, and I find it hard to see the Web in such quantized units as 1.0 or 2.0. To me, there are a number of technologies and best practices that have been developed over the years, the adoption of which has come in stops, starts, stutters, gradual transitions, and everything in between. Google tends to take a very utilitarian view of technologies: we want the best tool for the job. Whatever enables us to offer fast, efficient, usable, accessible, and powerful services to our users.

JavaScript is used extensively in Gmail and Calendar. Our new Talk gadget for iGoogle uses Flash. The control panel for Google Apps uses CSS throughout. I'm continually amazed by the innovation Google engineers manage to achieve with technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, which are many years old and were never really designed to handle the powerful applications we've created.

Q: Is Google Apps built with web accessibility in mind with respect to disabled users? And if so, how?

A: Accessibility of web applications for people with disabilities is a very challenging problem, one that we are working to solve. I am a member of a team of people at Google working to develop better processes and educate Googlers about the challenges we face in this area, as well as best practices for creating accessible products.

Q: Google Apps was created last year. How has this suite of online software applications and web publishing tools changed from then to now from a user experience perspective?

A: Initially the product was called Gmail for Your Domain and the scope was very limited. We have continued to add services to the product, enabling a number of communication and collaboration activities to be hosted in the Google computing cloud. This is in line with our mission to make information, in this case the information created and shared by our users, universally accessible and useful. I think Google Apps has also resulted in a greater need to integrate across our services and this work has direct benefits for individual consumers as well.

Q: Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, was recently quoted as saying that Apps and online software applications is a new focus for Google, in addition to search and ads, in what he calls a "shift to an online lifestyle" and Google is creating web-based applications that support that lifestyle with Google Apps. What are some of the user experience advantages and challenges that are unique to online apps versus the traditional desktop software like Microsoft Office?

A: Our customers can access their data from any device with a web connection. Gmail leverages Google's massive supercomputer to store vast amounts of information and our customers derive piece of mind from the knowledge that they won't lose their data, even if their computer breaks or is stolen. Hosting data in Google's cloud makes sharing and collaborating super easy, since information isn't chained to a single device. And users only have to worry about one program to run - the browser - no need to install and maintain a bunch of applications.

Designing web applications is a difficult problem for a number of reasons. As I mentioned before, the foundation technologies were never really designed for the complex tasks we're asking them to do. Also, the Web as a medium is highly variable and customizable. Web applications must function on a variety of browsers running on a variety of operating systems and displayed within a variety of browser window sizes. There is also the matter of bandwidth and connectivity.

Q: What can you share with us on the future enhancements planned for Google Apps? What's next on the roadmap?

A: We'll soon be adding presentation software to our suite of services and email migration for our Premier and Education Edition customers will be available soon. As always, we are continually innovating and improving our applications.

Thanks, Jon! This has been great. We look forward to more cool stuff from Google Apps.

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/).