Usability

Vilfredo Federic Damaso Pareto was born in 1848. During his notable career in the field of micro-economics, he observed that 80% of the income in 19th century Italy went to the richest 20% of the population. This became known as the Pareto prinicple, and later on as the more general “80/20 rule” As you can imagine, it’s a significant stretch to relate an observation about wealth distribution in Italy to the design of user interfaces, but it does happen. I have three main problems with Pareto being used to justify decisions…

1. The data rarely backs it up
   Even with tonnes of usage data, or Google Analytics data, it’s very tricky to find this mythical 20% that accounts for 80% of the usage. Also, if/when you do find it, you have to make sure that it reflects what the users want, not what they click. I’ve worked with clients who were adamant that their “About page” was their most popular, only to see all the users end up there whilst hunting for a non-existent contact number. Analytics only tells you the what, not the why.
2. Some vital features are rarely used
   From what I’ve seen, less than 1% of users will change their password arbitrarily. If you’re just going to focus on the 20%, you can annoy a lot of people. There are a lot of high priority features that don’t see much usage.
3. What does it really mean?
   If I told you that Paste, Save, Copy, Undo and Bold account for 32% of the commands used in Microsoft Word, would you really alter the UI based on that? Paste alone is responsible for 11% of the commands, so it should have a super big button, right? At least 25 times the size of word count? Nonsense.

I know we use Pareto’s principle as a little nugget to capture clients ears and make them think about focussing on what's important rather than expanding their product to become the sum of all desired features. That's understandable. But in this new age of Less Software(tm), lets not get carried away. You can’t design software based solely on quantitative research. Especially when that research comes from 19^th century Italian economics.

Whenever I’m designing an application in Omnigraffle, I use the YUI stencils which are really great. There is one whole stencil devoted to Advertising styles, leader boards, banners all the usual stuff. They follow all the advertising standards (125x125 etc), and for the most part they do the job, that is they allow you to indicate where the ads will appear. They lull you into a false sense of security however …

I’m shocked by the amount of criticism that the XO laptop has received. Interaction designers everywhere are falling over each other in a rush to find the next serious violation of a usability metric that they’re mistakenly porting to laptop design for 3rd world children. Just because a guideline exists for rich people and their e-commerce websites it doesn’t mean it holds true for 4 year old children experiencing technology for the first time in Africa. They also seem to forget that a novel enough project can break every interaction guideline in the book and still succeed. There are some experiences you can not hold a yard stick up to, and say “Usability = 20% therefore product will fail”. Remember, it’s not just usability that defines success. I believe usability only determines success when products have worthwhile competitors.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band are hugely popular with people who can't (and probably could never) play guitar really well. When they’re rocking out in their bedroom, they couldn’t give a shit whether it’s real or not, they’re just really enjoying themselves. The same is true for guitarists who close their eyes and imagine they're on stage. Unfortunately I’ve met the following XKCD character and I’m sure you know a couple yourself.

The sheer frustration is evident on their face, which silently screams… “But you didn’t spend years learning guitar, how dare you experience the same joy as me, with just a few plastic buttons? ” If the experience is good enough, the medium is irrelevant. (Yes, I realise thats the selling point of heroin)

Many of the recent social sites (i.e. web 2.0 style sites) presented some serious usability problems, and ignored many previously unquestionable design guidelines. If they were submitted for usability analysis they could have flunked under a sea of "Unexpected behaviour", or "User not sure what the [+] button does". However the novelty of peer produced content, plus the quality of the delivery ensured they would succeed. No matter what Jakob Nielsen says.. It's important to remember that if you're doing something really new, the old rules might not apply that well.

I believe that the XO laptop will do well, and people who are criticising it seem to be underestimating the design challenges the team faced. In 2002 Nicolas Negroponte set about the challenge of delivering a laptop for $100 to children in the 3rd world. 5 years later people are using them. There are now children in Peru who are, for the first time, seeing and recording video footage, drawing cartoons, playing maths games, reading hundreds of eBooks and much more. Considering that previously these children saw maybe four or five books per year, it’s hard not to call this project a success.

Yes, the interface could be better. So could every interface. This is a first run, it will only get better and better. I have no doubt that the next OS will blow "Sugar" out of the water, and that's also something to celebrate. Besides, the children (aka the end-users) seem to like it in its current form. What are you gonna do, tell them they can’t possibly be having fun due to a level 3 violation of Fitts law in the second screen? (OMGZ, how could they make that mistake!!1!)

Following from the last post, my alter ego in iQ Content had this to say?

I am married to GMail at this point, I can't see myself using any other mail client for the foreseeable future. If it sounds like I am criticizing it, I really am not. Behind every great application are users pushing it to be just that little bit better, and that's all I'm trying to do here.

It's just not good enough yet, that's all. Read the full story

When I posted recently my 9 suggested improvements for Mozilla Firefox, I made the silly mistake of posting it to digg before I went to bed. I woke to 90 comments, a dead site, and 200+ comments on digg.com about 99% of which can fall into the following categories...

• OMG WTF? Dis got dugg? Bullshit! This is just Apple FanBoy BS
• You can’t just say “noticeably faster”!!!
• Use Opera
• Good post/Thanks for writing/ Please write one for what X should steal from Y
• Firefox is already good enough, these are only minor improvements, You can do all of this with Firefox extensions

As a quick reply I’ll quickly say that I am a full time user of Mozilla Firefox, on Windows XP or Ubuntu. Calling me an Apple Fanboy is incorrect, and for future reference if someone makes a point you usually reply with a rebuttal supporting your argument. The very second you hear “Fanboy” during a technical debate, you should realise that what's really being is said is the following …

“I can't find a worthwhile retort or counter argument. Unfortunately I don't have the grace to concede the point to you, so instead I will imply your opinion is insignificant because it is biased.

On the issue of “noticeably faster”, this one annoys the hell out of me. I could have said “It renders the average HTML component 27.32% faster than Mozilla Firefox”, but who the fuck cares? Users only care about improvements if they notice them. That’s why I said “noticeably faster”. Just like users only care about new features, if they notice them. So to the 200+ odd dickheads on digg who want benchmark performance details, and to Steve who emailed me saying... “Before saying one product is faster than another you must provide the details of your scientific experiment which I PRESUME you have conducted”, here are the details of my experiment…

I installed Safari for Windows on 2 computers, and noticed it rendering HTML faster than Firefox.

As a side note, it's worth pointing out that the most requested in Office 2007, were already available in previous versions of Office (some of them going back to 2000), but the users simply didn’t notice them. It's not about what’s in the source code, or what a plug in can do, it’s about what the user notices. You can’t use something if you don’t know it exists.

To the use Opera crowd, fair enough, maybe I should use Opera. I have no argument against Opera, having never used it. That doesn’t disqualify my opinions about Firefox and Safari though. I should also thank these Opera guys for writing informative comments too.

To anyone who offered constructive criticism, or wrote nice things, Thank You. It reminds me why I leave comments on, at a time when all my favourite blogs are explaining whey they’re more trouble than their worth. To anyone who runs a blog and isn't looking to earn money off it, believe me when I say this…
You do not want to be on the digg.com frontpage.
You might think it will raise your profile in the blogosphere. It won't. You might think it will improve the reputation of your company. It won't. You might think that the people arriving from digg will do something other than nitpick, piss, or moan. 99% of them won't. In fact, even if you're just looking for people to click your adverts, digg.com users aren't the droids you’re looking for.

Aiming for the top spot on digg is the blogging equivalent of a girl trying to sleep with the college quarterback. It's not an exclusive club, anyone with half a brain can achieve it. When it's all done and dusted 10 minutes later you'll wish it had never happened. Jason Kottke was spot on

When you write a blog post, you like the idea that you can head to bed and not wake up with a blog post covered in childish insults. I’d love to say I don’t really care what people write here on my site, but I do, and I hate that fact that my last post looks like 70 people took an intellectual dump on it. Joel certainly wasn’t talking about me when he wrote the following but I agree with the sentiment…

“You don’t have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else’s thoughts. That’s not freedom of expression, that’s an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they’ll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you’ll move up in PageRank, and you’ll have influence and your ideas will have power.”

(Joel Spolsky, "Learn from Dave Winer")

This last group of people, the "these are only minor improvements, already available through plug-ins" group are the ones that just don't understand that usability is a game of inches. I'll start a war by saying this, but these people are the reason why an awful lot of open source software is shit. They create a tolerance of things that are "good enough". The iPod Mini was good enough in August 2005. In fact it was the fastest selling music player that year, and probably would have remained in that position for another year. What did Apple do with it? They retired it and released something that was far better.

If you stop at "Good enough", you're leaving a big fat "insert better product here" sign above your head. Someday that product will come along and you'll be wondering where it all went wrong. Every tiny improvement that you don't make forms a checklist for your competitors. Once that checklist is long enough, you better believe that your days are numbered. You will lose your market share, one user at a time.

Every day I see little things in Safari that could and should be copied. In Safari if I type destraynor.cmo into my url bar, it realises that there is no .cmo, and looks at previous sites I've visited, and sends me to destraynor.com. Firefox doesn't do that. Not without installing extensions. The majority of internet users do not feel the need to install custom browser components surprisingly. When they see Safari do something clever like this they don't think "Hey, that's cool, I better check mozilla.org to see if anyone has written an extension to spell check urls", they just think "Hey that's cool", or maybe "Hey that's cool, I wish firefox could do that." That’s why you have to fight for every inch. If you can't take my advice, at least listen to Al Pacino

Unrelated

iQ Content are looking for a Project Manager. If you can manager teams to make sure they deliver high quality software/websites on time, on budget, and on a regular basis, why not apply. It's an excellent place to work. And you get to tell me what to do If you know someone who is a good fit, please let them know about the opening. I'd really appreciate it if you'd mention this on your blog too.