Hi, I'm Aaron Richard. You might remember me as that guy from some website who goes by the name "Ralph The Magician."
I live and work around San Francisco. I design. I code. I like to create things. I like radio, tea, and sailboats.
This is one of my blogs. I try to update it daily with my thoughts on the interwebs and other topics which pique my interest. I maintain two other blogs: Works by Magic & Rants by Magic
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TwitterFacebookFlickrVimeoJoel Spolsky argues that ‘Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.
I'm not exactly looking for a night club experience when I read my email. How does this even make any sense?
Really simple idea. Really good idea. Firefox has been playing around with this to some extent, but Devin at UX Magazine really took this idea all the way. This would be a really great system for complex sites like Amazon, and particularly useful on mobile devices.
And while actually implementing this in the browser is a stretch, adding this kind of dynamic navigation that scrolls with the page might not be a bad idea for big websites.
In February, the Test Pilot team at Mozilla Labs rolled out a test to explore usage of the Firefox menu bar . This menu item usage study aims to help guide the UX team as they create a fully optimized design by answering 3 questions.
* Which menu items are the most commonly used?
* Which menu items are the least commonly used?
* How long do users spend exploring the menu bar contents before selecting each particular menu item?After we received the raw data, Blake Cutler and Christoper Jung from Mozilla Metrics team did some great work to understand what this data is telling us. Here are a couple of preliminary findings regarding the first 2 of these 3 questions. Take a look!
This is pretty freaking impressive. Why don't agencies do this? Hell, most web development studios don't do this. If companies spent less on rich media and more on actually optimizing and iterating on the properties they already have they wouldn't have to go out and spend buckets of media every time they want to say something.
It seems like people only interact with about a dozen different functions regularly. I wonder if other applications follow a similar pattern. It would be an interesting exercise to design a website or application and say, from the beginning, "There will be 12 features, and only 12 features. What are they?" Literally, if you just started creating a list of all the functions you'd expect a user to want to use (or better, if you could do research like this ahead of time and find out for sure) and just design an interface around those elements and nothing else.
We've known how to test TV and print for years, but when it comes to digital we just pretend like we don't know how or that it's too expensive. We do know how. We just choose not to. Why? (Hint: It's not because it's too expensive either.)
It would be really nice to test iterations of a website or application on a sample that was statistically significant. And you don't need pay a firm tens of thousands of dollars to do that kind of work. There are desktop applications like Silverback that do a lot of the work for you. All you've got to do is get a few people in front of a computer and test whatever it is you've created. You could find 30 people in your target demographic and pay them $100 each, for a total cost of $3,000, and gain real insight into how your information architecture and user interface work. More importantly, you'll find out what parts of your overall user experience are completely flawed.
One of the biggest problems with Facebook is how much it keeps changing. Change is good, but Facebook is ridiculous. It seems like every six months there’s a new version. Billions of cumulative hours are lost every year as all 350 million users have to search around in order to figure out where things have moved to and what the new features actually do (which is usually nothing).
Facebook started so simply, and every iteration pushes it further from its roots. According to a recent blog post by Mark Zuckerberg, they are now getting rid of regional networks. With every iteration Facebook becomes more like Twitter. It becomes harder to segment your friends into groups. Instead of giving users control Facebook wants to put everything that happens into a single stream and have a magic algorithm tell you what’s important to you. Maybe this time next year Facebook can develop a new tagline, “The largest social network with no networks!”And who knows what other fun changes they’ll make. The only good thing I’ve seen them do in a while is Facebook Lite. It’s fantastic. If tomorrow they decided to get rid of the current version and replace it with Facebook Lite, I could get behind that.