Theo Mandel's Usability Blog

12 of the Year’s Best Ideas in Interface Design [Slideshow]

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

Fast Company‘s Co.Design did their research and came up with 12 very cool UI ideas. Here’s what they say:

This past year, we brought you stories on everything from tweeting toddler toys and streamlined ATMs to news-reading apps and remote controls that magically change channels with a wave of the hand. Though wildly different from one another, these projects share a common denominator: They all display intriguing user-interface innovations.

User interfaces, when done well, are the unsung hero of product design. They’re the difference between a printer whose buttons you can figure out without even reading the instructions and one you want to throw across the room. Now, with the rise of personal computing, interfaces are more relevant than ever before, providing the crucial link between physical objects and the virtual world. Above, we’ve collected some of the year’s cleverest, clearest, and most creative UIs. Enjoy!

Check it out!

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Making “Boring” Better – Virgin America Airlines In-Flight Video

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

Mark Hurst of Good Experience posted this on how Virgin America improved the user experience of passengers on their flights. Other airlines should learn from this experience.
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How Virgin America’s customer experience turns “boring to better”

Virgin America is my favorite domestic airline, in part because of the way it treats an overlooked part of the flying experience: the safety demonstration. This is the video they show before every flight.

Note just three elements of the experience:

• Design: The video is visually appealing, created as what appears to be a hand-drawn cartoon.

• Humor: It contains real-life actual humor throughout, to keep passengers engaged. (Don’t miss the nun packing up the Linksys router, and the matador sitting next to the bull.)

• Common sense: My favorite moment of the video is where the narrator says, “For the .0001% of you who have never operated a seat belt before, it works like this…” In other words: we acknowledge that most of you already know this, but we gotta read it anyway. Virgin America comes across as a human organization willing to exercise common sense on behalf of the passenger.

Compare this to the safety videos shown on most other airlines: bland staging, “flight attendants” who are probably just hired actors going through the motions, narration straight out of an FAA safety document. No creativity, no joy. Mainly boredom.

Most airlines look at the safety video and say, “It’s a chore we gotta get through.” Virgin America says, “Here’s an opportunity to create a good experience.” The difference in attitude toward that one detail – just one moment in the entire travel experience – speaks volumes about the commitment to customer experience.

Posted in Real-World Usability, Usability Humor, User Experience | Leave a comment

Theo Mandel and Larry Marine present “Agile – When Theory Meets Reality” at RM PDMA

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

Theo Mandel and Larry Marine present “Agile – When Theory Meets Reality” at the Rocky Mountain PDMA monthly meeting on September 16, 2010. Larry Marine, NPDP, is President at Intuitive Design Group and member of RM PDMA.

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) is the premier global advocate for product development and management professionals. Our mission is to improve the effectiveness of individuals and organizations in product development and management. This is accomplished by providing resources for professional development, information, collaboration and promotion of new product development and management.

Session Summary:

Agile is not the proverbial Silver Bullet. In fact, the common misperceptions about Agile processes doom many a project. In this presentation, Larry and Theo will discuss some of the common mistakes witnessed in the real world and how to avoid them.

Agile processes are development processes, not design processes. Designing products iteratively, while you develop provides rather poorly designed products. This might be great for engineers, but is not so attractive or useable by the customers.

In essence, you cannot achieve revolutionary designs with an evolutionary process. Iterative design is an evolutionary design method that incrementally improves an initial design. If the initial concept is flawed all you end up doing is designing the wrong thing, very well. Larry and Theo will discuss how accurately prioritizing what tasks your product should support for the end user helps eliminate unnecessary “features” that steal time from your project, thus ensuring you have the time to do it right.

The reality is that you need to design first, and build later. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. You would not let your carpenters design your building, would you? Larry and Theo will discuss how Agile processes also benefit from a clearly defined set of blueprints, and they will also go over how they used their knowledge of Agile to identify a gaping hole in Hollander’s product offering by integrating their design efforts with their new Scrum processes.Join us for a clarifying look at Agile processes and learn tools to improve your success developing new products.

<< View the RM PDMA Event >>

Posted in Application Usability, Product Design, Product Development, Technology | Leave a comment

Observing the Customer Experience

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

Mark Hust of Good Experience runs a wildly successful and informative conference, Gel, every year that focuses on user experience. One of the key speakers was Alex Lee, president of OXO.

From Good Experience’s blog:

Product developers everywhere could learn a lesson from OXO’s angled measuring cup (shown here), which was born out of some very simple, very smart research.

In the video below, the president of OXO International, Alex Lee, tells about how his researchers observed ordinary consumers using their (non-angled) measuring cups. Users would fill up the cup part way, then bend over to check the level – then fill some more, then bend over again to check the level. This pointed the way for OXO’s innovation: showing the amount-markings at an angle, so users can easily read the amount as they fill the cup.

But here’s the thing about the research: customers never said they wanted an angled measuring cup. In fact, users weren’t even aware that there was a problem to be solved. Consumers didn’t say, “I wish I could read the markings more easily.” They muddled through without complaint. And yet the innovation came directly from observing customers. How?

Simply by observing the customer experience. The job of any product developer, any innovator, is to identify an unmet need – a pain point – a market opportunity – and the best way of doing that is by observing customers. Which means their actual real-world behavior – what they do, not what they say they do. This reveals the genuine customer experience.

Good research like this doesn’t ask customers leading questions, and it doesn’t have to ask customers to design a solution. It simply requires watching and listening. Once you observe that “customers seem to spend a lot of extra energy to read the amount,” the stage is set for the solution.

Here’s Alex Lee, talking about research, product design, and other processes at OXO: Watch video

Posted in Real-World Usability, Technology, User Centered Design (UCD) | Leave a comment

Smashing Magazine: 40+ Helpful Resources On User Interface Design Patterns

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

User interface design patterns are common researched and reusable solutions to frequent user interface problems. There are a number of user interface pattern repositories. This article in Smashing Magazine lists over 40 resources for user interface design patterns. Here’s what they say about it:

In this article, we share with you the best of the best, cream of the crop sites, galleries, online publications, and libraries devoted to sharing information and exploring concepts pertaining to User Interface design patterns. Use these recommended sources to gain knowledge about a particular UI problem or to gain inspiration and insight on best practices, techniques, and examples of exemplary UI designs. Great thank-you goes to Pavel Konoplitski for providing us with related resources.

<< Here’s the article >>

Posted in Application Usability, User Centered Design (UCD), Web Usability | Leave a comment

Electronic Pill Bottle Cap Increases Medication Use, Study Says

Posted on July 4, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

Finally, technologists provide enhancements to healthcare usability! Usability of medicine pill bottles, that is!!

I work on the usability of healthcare software systems. I’m glad to see that usability professionals are also working on medical devices and other areas of people’s life impacted by their health. Here’s a summary of the study:

Experimental electronic pill bottle caps prompted up to 99 percent of the participants of a study to stay on their medication schedules, says the Center for Connected Health. The pill bottle covers send wireless signals that activate a glowing light, a tune, automated calls, text messages or e-mails to notify patients that it’s time to take their medication.

Here’s the eWeek.com article

Posted in Healthcare Usability, Real-World Usability, Technology, User Centered Design (UCD) | Leave a comment

Ideo – The Future of Self-Service Banking

Posted on July 3, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

ATM banking systems haven’t kept up with touchscreen technology. Look what you can do on an iPad and then look at your bank’s ATM screen. There’s no reason an ATM needs to have an out-dated on-screen with buttons on the frame of the hardware.

Ideo created an new ATM user interface and interaction concept for a Spanish bank, BBVA, that is now being implemented.

Take a look at this very interesting video:
http://futureselfservicebanking.com/

Beats the heck out of your current ATM interface, doesn’t it?

Posted in Real-World Usability, Technology, User Centered Design (UCD) | Leave a comment

Healthcare wants a tablet, but not Apple’s iPad

Posted on June 11, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

Since the introduction of the iPad, everyone has wondered if this is the ultimate tablet platform. However, one industry that has been using tablet computers for many years – the healthcare industry – does not necessarily think the iPad is the bee’s knees. Here’s the survey results from February 2010:

“Last week, during the fever pitch surrounding the announcement of Apple’s iPad tablet, Software Advice surveyed 178 physicians, nurses, medical students and healthcare IT professionals about what the healthcare industry’s ideal tablet would look like. This isn’t our first time talking tablets and healthcare. In April of last year, we wondered if the Apple tablet would become the ideal device to run electronic health record (EMR) software.

Our goal with this survey: Find out what healthcare professionals want in a tablet and how well Apple’s iPad fulfills those wants. Unfortunately for the iPad, as we found out last Wednesday when Steve Jobs unveiled the tablet’s features, it only has a few of the top “must-have” features for healthcare use.“

This chart shows how likely respondents are to purchase a tablet for healthcare use in the next year.

<< View Survey >>

Posted in Healthcare Usability, Real-World Usability, Technology, User Centered Design (UCD) | Leave a comment

Mandel presentes “Golden Rules of Usable Web Design” at Direct Marketing Association Conference

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

Theo Mandel, Ph.D. presented a session at Rocky Mountain Direct Marketing Association’s (RMDMA) Direct Marketing Day conference in Denver on May 19, 2010. The session was titled, “The Golden Rules of Usable Web Design.”

Each year, the Rocky Mountain Direct Marketing Association hosts DM DAY, the region’s most comprehensive, best-attended direct-marketing event. The 2010 event was no exception, presenting a full day of authoritative speakers, timely seminars and substantive workshops that addressed the wide range of skills and expertise direct marketers need to stay competitive. Visit the Conference Website.

Mandel created a webpage for session attendees, providing links and materials, including the presentation, the “Golden Rules” chapter of his book, and charts and checklists for reviewing your websites. Visit the Golden Rules of Usable Web Design webpage.

Posted in Marketing Usability, Search Engine Optimization, Technology, Web 2.0 | Leave a comment

iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing – Mixed Results!

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

Now that the iPad is out and people are using the new apps supposedly designed for the iPad, their usability falls short of the expected Apple usability experience.

Jakob Nielsen, in his Alertbox, May 10 2010, summarized his findings:

“iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.”

Many apps approached the iPad as just a big iPhone:

“But from an interaction design perspective, an iPad user interface shouldn’t be a scaled-up iPhone UI.

Indeed, one finding from our study is that the tab bar at the bottom of the screen works much worse on iPad than on iPhone. On the small phone, users are likely to notice the muted icons at the bottom of the screen, even if their attention is on content in the middle of the screen. But the iPad’s much bigger screen means that users are typically directing their gaze far from the tab bar and they ignore (and forget) those buttons.

Another big difference between iPad and iPhone is that regular websites work reasonably well on the big tablet. In our iPhone usability studies, users strongly prefer using apps to going on the Web. It’s simply too painful to use most websites on the small screen. (Mobile-optimized sites alleviate this issue, but even they usually have worse usability than apps.)”

<< View Nielsen’s Alertbox >>

Posted in Mobile Usability, Technology, User Centered Design (UCD), Web Usability | Leave a comment

The Future of Shopping – Real World User Experiences!

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

A video by Cisco shows how new technologies and user interfaces can totally change our real-world common experiences. Even tasks such as trying on clothes in a store can become a more enjoyable and satisfying experience, especially for guys who hate to shop and hate to accompany their wife or girlfriend shopping!

<< Check out the Video >>

Posted in Real-World Usability, Technology | Leave a comment

New Users for the iPad – Iggy (a cat) investigates an iPad

Posted on April 28, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

You knew this would happen sooner or later. Now that there is a large touch-based tablet, little kids and pets are now experimenting with this new user interface!

YouTube is now getting flooded with videos of pets playing with an iPad. Here’s one of many. Enjoy!

<< View Iggy using an iPad >>

Posted in Real-World Usability, Uncategorized, Usability Humor, Users | Leave a comment

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

Posted on April 28, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

It’s official – “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” In an article for the New York times, many high-ranking officials are taking shots at Microsoft’s PowerPoint program. Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

Interesting article about how the military has become so dependent on PowerPoint that it’s a standard joke among the highest levels of our government.

“Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making.”

A PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan certainly succeeded in that aim

<< View the Article >>

Posted in Real-World Usability, Technology, Users | Leave a comment

Counterpoint to the “Madlibs” Form Style

Posted on February 28, 2010 by Theo Mandel, Ph.D.

As I looked closely at the different form styles in the previous blog entry, I noticed there are a number of differences, in addition to the different form layouts. Any or all of these changes could have contributed to the reported test results.

Here’s a well-written counterpoint blog post:

Lesson from Madlibs Signup Fad: Do Your Own Tests

What do you think?

Posted in User Centered Design (UCD), Web 2.0, Web Usability | Leave a comment