Windows Vista: Lacking in product conceptual integrity?

From the article Facing the full horror of Windows Vista at iTWire:

So far, Transit has been using Vista Business full-time for a fortnight. And so far, we've found nothing that works better than in Windows XP, dozens of things that are annoyingly different without being a functional improvement, and several things that work at best intermittently and at worst not at all. On the whole, we wish we'd never moved.

Is this what Alan Cooper meant in his book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum when a product can lack conceptual integrity if a team of competent designers don't do their homework, develop personas, create specifications and a storyboard?

Well, I actually remember Cooper bringing up conceptual integrity in the context of not letting users directly define the product with feature requests, etc. Instead, it seems to make more sense to first have a bottom-up research approach where data about the users turns into personas and models which then gives way to a top down design approach from there.

Having random feature injections in lieu of user/persona-driven design seems like a bottom-up design approach which could lead to clunky user experience. Bottom-up research guiding top-down design lends itself to focused, coherent user experiences. That's my take on it anyway.

All that research work is to presumably understand what the user aims to achieve and accomplish and then to allow that knowledge to guide design. A storyboard would show how Vista "works better than Windows XP" from a persona perspective and how the "dozens of things" that are "(annoyingly) different" would be actual functional improvements.

As for the "several things that work at best intermittently and at worst not at all," I'm wondering if that's the job for QA and usability testing.

I doubt Microsoft would embark on the production of Vista without "design due diligence" especially with their roster of notable and brilliant designers and researchers. I'd be interested in seeing what their data looked like and how it translated into product specification, interaction design, and the usability testing results.

It would be even more interesting as a case study if Microsoft technically conducted the entire design and development process appropriately and the iTWire comments are accurate. (I've never even tried Windows Vista so I have no bearing on the accuracy of the comments.)

Shipping Notifications: Gamefly vs. Netflix

I've been a Gamefly subscriber for a good while now and I've been generally pleased with the user experience. However, recently joining Netflix demonstrated that Gamefly could easily improve their shipping notifications.

Here is what Gamefly shipping notification looks like in my inbox:

Here is what Netflix shipping notification looks like in my inbox:

Notice that Gamefly tells me what has shipped while Netflix goes one step further and tells me what day to expect it. I think it's nontrivial that Netflix uses days of the week in the e-mail subject line notification. I'm going to receive it within one week for sure (usually within days). Most people know what day it is instead of what date it is.

Supplying a date in the subject line would needlessly increase the cognitive load for customers who just want to know "What am I getting and when will I get it?" I know today is Friday and if it's arriving Tuesday, with little effort I know that's 4 days from now. Additionally, knowing it comes on Tuesday includes connotations that may mean something to me.

For example, Tuesday is a weekday/workday; it's far from the weekend; I have weekly presentations to give on Wednesdays; and so on. All this information would help me to realize I won't get to watch it until Thursday or Friday and decide to let my neighbor borrow it.

Instead, if I see it is arriving on the 15th, I have to recall today is the 11th, the difference is 4 days, 4 days from today is Tuesday, and then the rest would be the same. Maybe a minor amount of friction but I can always appreciate less cognitive friction.

Here is what the content of the Gamefly shipping notification looks like:

Here is what the content of the Netflix shipping notification looks like:

Gamefly adds a "shipped on" which is much less useful that Netflix's "arriving on or around…" note. Kudos to Netflix for repeating that info anyway. I know that Gamefly has detailed records of how quickly different customers receive their games. So does Netflix. I'm glad Netflix puts that information to use and I'm hoping that Gamefly is working on it.

Seven habits for junior designers

Chanpory Rith wrote an article Talent Isn't Everything over at Boxes and Arrows which has 7 interesting suggestions for junior designers to improve chances at success:

1. Work quickly. Produce a lot.
2. Attend to details.
3. Be versatile.
4. Make an effort to learn.
5. Anticipate problems.
6. Set goals.
7. Display a positive attitude.

Of course, he goes into much more detail for each step than my copied list does.

What I enjoyed about the article is how he focused on practical details that junior level designers could pick up on such as focusing on getting your ideas and work out for others to see as opposed to spending significant extra time on trying to get it "perfect" since it would probably be more efficient to let other designers give feedback and advise.

I now realize that junior designers and senior designers have different skill sets and are expected to produce somewhat different things. I'm going to try and keep an eye out for information that could help me to learn more about what makes more sense for junior designers to concentrate on and what junior designers should expect to pick up or refine later as they transition into senior design positions.

I find that having realistic and clear expectations for myself and knowing what is expected of me by others helps to significantly reduce stress.

Chris Bangle On Love and Trust… In Design

This video is great and I hope many people watch it. The talk is not only eye-opening in content but also in delivery. While BMW designer Chris Bangle illustrates the way designers work and the love they have for it and each other, I found myself wondering about all the things he didn't mention that would normally be mentioned in a story like this. How did they gather data? How did they negotiate things? Who was on the team? What happened to the engineers? And so on…

In the end, I realize that his choices regarding omission and inclusion of content were challenging me to think above all the methods and technicalities of design and think about what it means to be a designer. Bangle's mental provocation will be buzzing in my head for some time to come…

CHI 2007: Day 2

Today, I spent all day in a course at CHI taught by Susan Dray and David Siegel from consulting firm Dray & Associates. While it was a good course overall, the first half of the course was relatively slow and as the course progressed, topics seemed to become exponentially more useful to consider. Unfortunately, time became a factor and the parts I was most interested in were rushed through.

During one of the breaks for the day-long course, I met a coursemate from Stanford who did research for Sony in Paris in her last summer break as an undergrad. She took one day off to take this course and meet with her colleagues from the summer in Paris. In another break, I got up out of my seat and turned around to see a friend and fellow designer Anshuman. He also took the day off to take this course. They both seemed to also think the course was a tad too general for their tastes.

An unofficial recurring minor theme in the conference presentations and courses thus far is the defense of qualitative research against statistical significance. Challenges from engineers and managers seem to focus on concerns regarding sample size and a bunch of other factors in any experimental method. Each speaker has a different answer to it but the general idea is that statistical significance is irrelevant when discussing user studies. Speakers seem very adamant about it and I see what they are saying, but at the same time, I imagine it being much harder to defend in real life than they make it seem.

I've been wanting to talk to some of the groups of foreign attendees to see what HCI (and the industry of HCI-related design) is like in their countries. I ignorantly assume that many countries and their corresponding industries are behind us in what still seems like early stages for the USA. I also want to ask them which research labs, design firms, or companies from their countries they most admire. I'm pretty sure that would yield a bunch of interesting stuff to look at which would normally be much more tedious for someone like me to find out.

Being at a conference is oddly draining. I'll have to try save the rest of the ideas for future posts.

CHI 2007: Day 1

My first time at CHI has proven to be pretty interesting. I ran into a bunch of people I wasn't expecting to: Karen, Boaz, and Prof. Hollan from UCSD cogsci, Kevin from Stanford, Kerry from Google.

I went to a bunch of paper talks which were more interesting than I expected them to be. The Q&A sessions after each presentation are good. People ask good questions and it is thought-provoking. I am reminded of how in school everyone seems to hate the kid/s that raise their hand all the time and ask questions or make comments. Is it the same thing but somehow more enjoyable?

The author of the textbook for our Cognitive Engineering course (COGS 102C), Karen Holtzblatt taught a few courses. Kelly and I went to one each. It was interesting to hear her convey the same ideas in a more adamant and no-bull way. Also, she gave great examples of each main concept that made everything easy to understand. Sometimes when I read the hypothetical or procedural text, it can be ambiguous.

A few course points, paper presentations, and posters were especially intriguing but I'm too tired to write them in this post. Tomorrow, I've got an all-day course and I'm starting to wonder if that is an unrealistic plan. I guess we'll see!

Random observation: Lots of people from UK are at CHI.

Hi-res widescreen is a pleasure

Before I plow through my homework for tonight, I re-realized how much a pleasure working on my 1680 x 1050 pixel monitor is. I can easily work with an open PDF that has the homework problems on it and an open document to write in. There are times when I feel reading on the screen just doesn't cut it but that's a story for another day.

Entrepreneur Stories Are the Best

I find it particularly enjoyable to read entrepreneur and startup stories. Of course, mainly stories with good outcomes get circulated but I enjoy a quality about them that is reminiscent of any classic hero story formula. The great thing is that you as a reader might have real-world connection to aspects of the story either through similar experiences or because you know their product or industry.

For example, I think a big part of what would make reading the Google story interesting is the fact that it's something you use and know about and you could become aware of how it came to be. Then again, I'm an absolute documentary nut and I don't read much fiction.

I stumbled across this book while browsing the web, Founders At Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. The quotes are pretty interesting and I enjoy that the page numbers are cited, giving a sense of how the book might be paced and the range of variety.

I think I'll pick up a copy at some point and I hope that it will differ from other startup story books by presenting an interesting cross-section of startup lore as opposed to one profile that is drawn out for longer than necessary.

Get more results with fewer keywords

eBay has this interesting suggestion tool for when a search on their site yields zero items. Not only does it suggest alternative search strings with fewer keywords, it also shows how many items are found for which combinations of fewer keywords. Listing the number of items found for each possible query string provides decent information scent and seems to be the coolest part about this tool. Of course, I have to decide which keywords are the important ones but this saves a lot of my time and guesswork effort.

Pretty nifty!

Here's a direct link to the search string I used: "2001 monster 750 frame" in case you wanted to see if there are still no items and play with the alternate keyword combinations.

Loved Ones = Costs to Cut?

I recently bought some tickets at ticketmaster.com and after I completed my transaction, there was a link that said something like "Want to get $40 back? Find out how!" On that page, there was this picture of what looks like a father and son at a hockey game.

Hopefully it is supposed to say to me something like "Your son can go for free."