Web 2.0 Design and Usability

June 2009 Usability Update

2009-06-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

June 2009 Update: USEFUL TOOLS and Websites >>>

Here's some new articles and Web 2.0 sites you may find useful:

Web 2.0 Social Networks - Viral loops distilled

Looking for multi-touch demos and an Open Source SDK?

Want some practical tips on dealing with color blindness?

Easy online forms using Ajax

Want To Make Your Web Forms More Usable?

Upcoming 1 Hour Webinar - July 23rd, 2009- $129
With the convergence of Windows and the Web is upon us we have the opportunity to dramatically improve Web Form Usability with Ajax and make significant gains in user efficiency and lower training and support costs. Learn how to deliver the best of the web and the best of the desktop experience when it comes to interactive web-based forms.
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2 Day Immersion Seminars

Designing For Usability
We will show you how to adopt a user-centric perspective, apply a proven process for identifying true user requirements, develop and validate conceptual models, and create designs that are highly usable.
> San Francisco, Sept 1-2, 2009
> Chicago, Sept 29-30
> Toronto, Sept 15-16

Advanced UI Design for GUI and Web 2.0
Learn the techniques that Google Maps, Gmail, Flickr and a variety of new AJAX and Rich Internet applications have used to legitimize moving beyond HTML to deliver interactive, usable applications that deliver a best of the web and best of the desktop user experience.
> San Francisco, Sept 1-2, 2009
> Chicago, Oct 1-2
> Toronto, Sept 17-18
> Rome, Italy Nov 11-13 (3 Days)

Usability Master Class - Europe (1 day class)
> Vienna, Austria October 16th, 2009
> London, UK October 19th, 2009
> Copenhagen, Denmark October 20th

Enterprise Mashups and collaboration that works...

2009-05-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

I'll be speaking next week at a new conference here in the US. It's called Jboye and is focused on delivering practical enterprise solutions for collaboration and knowledge management in a vendor neutral environment. I've been speaking for 3 years at the sister conference in Aarhus, Denmark and have found it to be very focused, useful and insightful. Even if you can't make it this year, I'd put in on your list for next year and I'll keep things updated on my experience this year at the conference.

In the meantime, you may want to check out these enterprise solutions that seem to be getting traction:

Jackbe - Enterprise mashup solution. Sweetspot is a mashup layer that connects your web services in a secure, scalable framework.

Backbase - Enterprise Web 2.0 portal solution that actually delivers an easy to modify user experience.

zAgile - Open source Enterprise Semantic Wiki's - Has the potential to actually create usable knowledge across the enterprise.

Useful Web 2.0 Sites / Improving Form Usability

2009-04-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

Here's a few tools and Web 2.0 sites you may find useful:

Web 2.0 Travel site - Driven by User Generated Content:
http://www.uptake.com

Trying to create a cross-device Mobile Phone Application?
http://www.phonegap.com

Want to test your Website on hundreds of browser combinations?
http://browsershots.org/

Want To Make Your Web Forms More Usable?

Upcoming 1 Hour Webinar - May 14th, 2009- $129
With the convergence of Windows and the Web is upon us we have the opportunity to dramatically improve Web Form Usability with Ajax and make significant gains in user efficiency and lower training and support costs. Learn how to deliver the best of the web and the best of the desktop experience when it comes to interactive web-based forms.
> http://www.classicsys.com/css06/cfm/webinar.cfm?courseid=11

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

2009-01-06T10:31:00.000-08:00

A little New Year's humor on taking the one-click, one-button approach a bit too far.

Danish Design, Corporate Wikis and Enterprise Usability

2008-11-09T21:20:00.000-08:00

I just returned from my third year of speaking on Usability at the Jboye08 conference in Aarhus Denmark. With each annual visit, I enjoy meeting up with old colleagues and getting a different perspective on software design issues than I normally see at the conferences in the USA. Something about surrounding yourself in the simple, yet elegant style of Danish design for a week is both refreshing and inspiring. We were able to hear from the co-inventor of the Web (Robert Cailliau) and his perspective on the innovations that occurred at CERN in Switzerland and the subsequent nurturing of innovation to bring it to mainstream reality. Several speakers representing global companies in Europe shared actual real world examples of true enterprise Wikis and Social Networks that are actually working and taking hold across the enterprise. I was able to share some specific Usability insight on improving Form Usability and Advanced UI Desgin that was well received by the conference participants. Heading home through my connection in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, I was reminded of the great signage making it one of the most usable international airline hubs …and of course those clever men’s bathrooms with the ‘Fly in the toilet ’ to take advantage of men’s natural instinct to aim for a target and thus improve user performance of this necessary biological goal.

Google Chrome Browser Targets Key Web 2.0 Usability Issues

2008-09-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

The release of the new Google Chrome browser may provide a big boost in usability for those embracing advanced Web application design. Our early take on the browser highlights a few key things to consider:

Designed for web applications, not web pages
This has been a thorny issue for several of our clients deploying high volume transactional applications on the web. Things are great at 8am but as the day progresses the browser cannot seem to manage the DOM model and the browser gets unstable after several hours. Try it yourself with a large Gmail account and you'll see how things get dicey as your day progresses.

Each tab is a separate process
This will go a long way to create a more stable enterprise platform for web applications. Just the fact that one URL can no longer crash all other open pages (tabs) will be a huge win in the enterprise.

Using Google Gears leverages the desktop
Now you get a great infrastructure (Google Gears) to manage client-side persistent data without having to create your own framework. This is bundled with robust garbage collection / memory management to deliver speedy desktop performance.

Go ahead...try it out and let us know how it performs with your robust Web 2.0 applications!

We'll be discussing this and much more at this week's Advanced UI and Web 2.0 application design seminar in San Francisco.

Has this GMAIL Outage Proven It Has Become An Essential Web Utility?

2008-08-11T15:08:00.000-07:00

My Gmail account has been down this afternoon. We made the switch to use GMAIL web services as the primary funnel for all our emails due to the superior spam filters and improved AJAX (Desktop) experience. Now...it's down we have no access to emails. I'm seeing several panic posts around the blogosphere as this seems to be a widespread outage. Essentially GMAIL has become an essential utility for us like power, water, etc....however in this case we don't have a backup...

Making Complex Web Navigation a Usable Experience

2008-07-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

Information and feature overload is reducing user productivity and effectiveness. Here's my latest article from our research at Classic System Solutions, Inc. I discuss the popular complex navigation patterns and techniques aimed at creating a more usable experience.

Useful Tools To Help Improve Usability Of Software and Websites

2008-06-27T00:24:00.000-07:00

Here's a few tools we find useful on projects to help promote
and ensure usability:

Color Challenged Developers?
Here's a great tool to help your team select color a combination with aesthetic appeal and good usability.
Check out > ColorSchemer Studio

Need fast, interactive prototypes?
Develop fast interactive prototypes and generate a word doc for the boss and html prototypes for the users. The latest release can simulate AJAX interactions.
Check out > Axure Rapid Prototyper

Spending too much time copying that whiteboard user interface design?
This purpose built software cleans the glare and yellow from the photos you take of your whiteboard meeting notes and outputs an easy to read copy (better than those copy whiteboards!).
Check out > Whiteboard Photo

New Ajax Charting Tools May Improve Web Usability

2008-06-17T17:21:00.000-07:00

Here's an updated Ajax charting library to bring your static charts to life without causing excessive screen refresh issues.
ComponentArt Charting Gallery

Ever since Google Finance released their Flash based interactive stock charts, the bar has been raised on how to provide more useful 'Why" information vs. the traditional "Drilldown" to see more data approach.

How to Make Your AJAX Applications Accessible - 40 Tutorials and Articles

2006-06-29T00:33:00.000-07:00

ax Kiesler - How to Make Your AJAX Applications Accessible - 40 Tutorials and Articles

Google's Innovative Yet Limited AJAX Environment: GWT @ AJAXWORLD MAGAZINE

2006-05-30T01:52:00.000-07:00

http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/225045.htm

134 Ajax Frameworks and Counting

2006-05-10T22:22:00.000-07:00

134 Ajax Frameworks and Counting: "Ajax, AjaxExperience, AjaxPatterns, Frameworks, Libraries, Patterns I’m here in SF for The Ajax..."

Yahoo! Design Patterns Update

2006-05-10T22:14:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! Design Patterns Update: "The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library was updated today with new patterns for creating visual transitions, invitations, and page grids. In addition, the team has provided code libraries for windowing control, menus, auto-completion, CSS Fonts/Reset (which provide an optimal font-sizing strategy that normalizes browser-supplied CSS defaults), and Page grids (which provide seven basic wireframes and components taht together offer more than 100 page layouts — all of which scale up in size when the user applies browser-level font zooming).If all that wasn’t enough, Bill Scott (the hardest working man in rich internet applications today) provides a detailed look at the design considerations behind the invitation design pattern. Enjoy!Tags: patterns, UI components, yahoo, rias"

Leveraging Enterprise Applications with Web 2.0

2006-03-31T05:47:00.000-08:00

Delivering on the vision….
It all started a few years ago with the CIO vision… ‘We need a 360 degree view of the customer’. If your company is typical of most out there, you have spent the last few years integrating disparate data sources to transform the executive vision into a reality for your internal users.

How are you doing? Have you delivered on the promise? Are your users more empowered, clients ecstatic and CIO beaming in the ambiance of increased sales and improved customer service? If that reality is still a few years away, no worries, you are not alone. Many companies have found that building the foundation for delivering web enterprise applications is more complex than planned and are just coming online with solid architectures to deliver on the original goal. The good news is Web 2.0 user interface design is poised to provide truly useful methods of delivering complex data in ways that will deliver on the vision.

What is Web 2.0?
We believe Web 2.0 is not a revolution as much as an evolution. Simply put, the web is finally leveraging standards (CSS, JavaScript, etc) to deliver engaging, interactive and integrated content in ways that allow users to focus on the task and the customer rather than the interface. That is correct, Web 2.0 is an approach that uses standards-based technology (Ajax, Flash, Java) to deliver a better user experience, period. I know… you have heard this before... The slick sales team from XYZ Enterprise Solutions sold your management the last bill of goods on the 360 customer view implementation model using their ‘Integrated XYZ on every desktop’ promise. Unfortunately, the promise often was delivered with complex proprietary software based on UI technology decisions made 5-6 years ago. Worse yet, in order to integrate the enterprise solution, a majority of project effort was often spent on building web services to legacy data rather than focusing on custom tailored UI’s specific for the key user tasks. Web 2.0 thinking gives us the opportunity to refocus our efforts on usability to design the tailored solutions users have been requesting all along.

Most Enterprise Software Fails in Usability
Simply put, enterprise software vendors have too many masters and a flawed business model when it comes to usability. Consider this; the basic business drivers influencing design decisions in these companies is often contrary to good usability. Want a tough job? Work as a usability practitioner in one of the enterprise software companies.

More features, not less.
Imagine yourself, the head of sales, going into the CEO of XYZ Enterprise Software and recommending elimination of 30% of the low usage features requested by various customers and cutting functionality by another 25% to help make this year’s revenue numbers. This just will not happen. Instead, more features will get built, upgrade revenue will be collected, and the poor sap ;) trying to enter his time report into the recently upgraded self-service web-based time sheet system spends additional 15 minutes each week just trying to ensure he gets paid. Multiply this extra 15 minutes a week by the other 20,000 employees and the numbers become staggering.

‘Zero Footprint’ sells, thick client doesn’t.
What about those customer representatives in the call center? Are they really more productive with your new web-based application? Sometimes, the answer is yes, but often, I hear whispers from the users that the ‘Old’ client-server system was faster and more efficient than the new web-based application. Here in-lies the problem. Client-server and windows applications just don’t sell. CTO’s want zero-footprint applications to lower their deployment costs. This is a serious issue as companies can spend upwards of $1 million dollars just to roll out software patches onto thousands of machines. Browser-based applications deliver extremely low deployment costs…but until now at a steep operational cost, due to their point-click-wait behavior. Don’t believe me? Let’s do a test. Remove all your favorite IDEs (Visual Studio, Eclipse, JBuilder, Dreamweaver) and try building your next major application in a web-based IDE. Change a line a code, press submit, wait, scroll back to that section of code, repeat. Oh, by the way, the ‘Back’ button doesn’t work and don’t plan on having any ‘Undo’ capabilities. My point is we don’t eat our own dog food. Now go back and enjoy your favorite IDE.

Design for possibility, not probability.
New sales of enterprise software are dependent on smooth, quick implementations. Essentially the pitch at the executive level is often something like this: ‘We’ve figured out the industry best practices so you need to adapt your business to be in line with how our software works’. When the realities of a true project come into play, software vendors focus on meeting the needs of the client and since each client is usually a bit different the entire design approach becomes based on possibility instead of probability. Essentially, the thinking is ‘Let’s make this flexible so the next client installation goes more smoothly’. While this can be a good thing, it often complicates the user interface resulting in lower user productivity.

How does Web 2.0 Help?
Designing a Web 2.0 interface does give us a unique opportunity to fix what’s broken with most enterprise software today. Regardless of whether you are trying to implement the latest XYZ’s enterprise web solution or are building a custom web-based application, taking a Web 2.0 approach will likely make for a better user experience.

The Web 2.0 Approach
Since Web 2.0 is an approach, here are four characteristics I would focus on to improve the user experience.

Less Implementation, more content.
Web 1.0 was about bringing data to the desktop, often via portals. This often resulted in a ‘My XYZ’ page with a hundred links. Great. Now the user has a 1 in 100 chance of making the right choice. These systems were flexible and certainly better than logging into 5 disparate systems, but how much better are they than just creating a static HTML page with those same links or a “Main Menu’ in the old mainframe days? The web 2.0 approach will dispense with portlet views and provide integrated content tailored to how the user would actually use it. It will break the political boundaries within the company and provide rich contextual views so that users can make fluid decisions. Long gone will be the days of ‘We cannot give you access to the data, but you can link to us…is that ok?’ A great example of this approach is www.zillow.com where you can view real estate information from a customer view, not from a realtor view www.realtor.com.

Rich interaction…where needed.
I like Rich, engaging interfaces when they work the way a human works. Unfortunately, many of them to date are loaded with ‘surprises’ and new learning experiences most users are not willing to tolerate. On the other hand, when an interface works like the real world, most people are happy. Take for instance www.kayak.com . This travel site adjusts the selection of flights when I move the sliders on the left. My stereo works the same way. Move the volume slider and I enjoy more sound. No learning, no waiting, no back button.

Community collaboration.
We’re social creatures. Hang out at a mall and watch people for a day. You’ll learn a lot. When users look at your data, they often desire validation from others. Web 2.0 applications like www.flikr.com play on this natural human behavior to build decentralized social networks. That’s correct; your new Web 2.0 application will actually embrace feedback from everyone in your company with a bottom up approach rather than a top-down approach. This is not a radical as it seems. Most key business knowledge is already stored at the bottom level in spreadsheets and emails rather then the company’s ERP system. Just integrate your application to embrace this phenomenon.

Purpose Built.
Visit a construction site and hang out with a carpenter. You will likely find a selection of saws for specific types of jobs. The web allows us to create a 1-to-1 relationship with the user. Know them, build just what they need and they will be happy. Avoid ‘Boil the Ocean’ designs that try to meet the needs of every user but rarely meet the needs of any. This approach requires clear vision and strong leadership. Products like www.gmail.com are forging the path with simple but effective solutions. ‘I need to check my email, I don’t have much time and I don’t want spam.’ Done. Thanks Google.

What makes great software designs?
Over the years, I am continuously asked the most basic question: What makes great software? After some reflection my answer is quite simple.

A crisp understanding of the problem
A deep understanding of your users and their tasks
Design strategies that work the way humans work
A small team with passion and skills to solve the problem
An environment where people are truly productive

Nope. Web 2.0 didn’t make the list.
Why? In short, long after Web 2.0 has evolved into Web 3.0, etc. items 1-5 will still likely be true and valid. Until then, try using the Web 2.0 approach along with the basics of good design and you may just be able to apply a handy Botox treatment to spruce up the usability of your enterprise applications. After all, giving a 360 degree view of your customer should at least look good.

About Us

We spend most of our time training and consulting with Global 2000 clients and software vendors to help bring the world more usable software. We have fixed and mobile usability labs to validate our findings and we help them communicate good design solutions and guidelines with our own enterprise software, GUIguideTM.

If Web2.0 applied to cars

2006-03-31T05:44:00.000-08:00

If Web2.0 applied to cars: "If Web2.0 applied to cars… They would only be available in Lime Green, Orange, Hot Pink and Deep Blue. All of which also in gradients. Manufacturers..."

How can ajaxWrite be free? The “Culture Of Use” War

2006-03-31T00:47:00.000-08:00

How can ajaxWrite be free? The “Culture Of Use” War: "Michael Robertson’s latest shtick is ajaxWrite. Michael is yet another ex- Don Norman / UCSD student, and is well known as the founder of MP3.com..."

Why Mobile Ajax will replace J2ME and XHTML

2006-03-31T00:43:00.000-08:00

Why Mobile Ajax will replace J2ME and XHTML: "Ajit Jaokar has an opinion on platforms for mobile devices. He believes that the Ajax programming model will take on a large share of the dev mindshare in the future. In this article he discusses: The limitations of the browsing model on mobile devices and how these are being overcome The impact of Ajax on mobile applications development The potential of Ajax/browsing model to enable applications which target a large customer base. "

Ajax Resources

2006-03-31T00:14:00.000-08:00

Ajax Resources: "Alex Bosworth written a great article about the Ajax Mistakes often made by the web developers. read here And there is a wiki which says, what are the..."

Learning to love Web 2. (BBC News)

2006-03-31T00:10:00.000-08:00

Learning to love Web 2. (BBC News): "I've been sceptical about Web 2.0, since although there are a lot of cool toys out there, the idea that you can solve the problems of distributed computing by rewriting webpages on the fly seems rather optimistic, to say the least. But I'm starting to come round, if only because the explosion of creativity on the part of those developing new services and applications is so impressive. Part of the problem is of course trying to define the term Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly, the publisher and net advocate, coined it but he seems content to let it remain vague enough to encompass almost any web-based service that doesn't rely on static HTML pages.Add this article to Del.icio.usRead 267 more articles from BBC News sorted by date, popularity, or title."

How Web 2.0 Killed Microsoft

2006-03-30T23:20:00.000-08:00

How Web 2.0 Killed Microsoft: "Operating Systems Hardly Matter Any More I believe, now more than ever, that the operating system running your computer is irrelevant to your success. Your operating system is not that important to you as an individual. I still believe that operating systems are important, but only from an organization or industry point of view. Someone still [...]"

Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1

2006-03-30T23:18:00.000-08:00

Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1: "MrByte420 writes 'The Ruby On Rails team today released version 1.1 of the web framework. From the announcement: 'Rails 1.1 boasts more than 500 fixes, tweaks, and features from more than 100 contributors. Most of the updates just make everyday life a little smoother, a little rounder, and a little more joyful.' New features were examined back in February at Scottraymond.net and include Javascript/AJAX integration, enhancements to active record, and enhanced testing suites. Not to mention upgrading this time promises to be a piece of cake.'"

Round-up of 30 Ajax tutorials

2006-03-19T00:08:00.000-08:00

Round-up of 30 Ajax tutorials: "There are lots of people writing lots of tutorials about Ajax, apparently, and Max Kielser has created a list of 30 of them. The MDC’s short-but-sweet AJAX:Getting Started tutorial is included."

Too Many Ajax Calendars

2006-02-10T01:30:00.000-08:00

Too Many Ajax Calendars: "On his blog, Joel Spolsky, has posted some of his opinions on the proliferation of Ajax-enabled calendering systems that have been coming out lately - and how none of them seem to be up to the mark. For all the Ajax calendars that are appearing, it's a shame I can't find one which really meets my needs. I tried out Trumba, Kiko, 30 Boxes, Yahoo! Calendar, and Spongecell. I couldn't recommend any of them. My needs are probably weird, but not that weird. Further on in the post he mentions the simple needs he's looking for but hasn't found yet - things like: 'enter flights', 'understand timezones', and 'print out something reasonable'. He also touches on the 'ship early and often' mantra that so many largely anticipated sites seem to be following, without talking the time to fully develop a product that everyone won't think is 'lame' when they look and see it unfinished. He wraps it up with his theory as to why there are so many of these Ajax calendars popping up lately. According to him, it boils down to the creation of hype to try to garner corporate interest to, hopefully, get snatched up as the 'Next Big Thing'. "

Web Trends 2006 for Web Developers

2006-02-06T18:00:00.000-08:00

Web Trends 2006 for Web Developers: "2006 is just around the corner, and that means that it is time to bring some (vague) predictions for this web business we are in. The AJAX hype will go on - but eventually fail The rather sickening hype of AJAX is going to continue, and it will get very big in the first 6-8 months of 2006. But, as the end of 2006 nears AJAX, is going to fail. The reason is not because of AJAX itself - AJAX (or AHAX) is great tool. But, you do not base your decisions on a specific tool. You base your decisions on solving people's problems and goals. If AJAX turns out to be useful in a certain scenario - use it. Remember that we have been able to do what AJAX does for a long time - with frames. Frames were also at some point surrounded with hype, how many of us have created sites where only a small part of it changed. But, in the end we realized that this cool thing really got in the way of more important stuff. This does not mean that AJAX will go away - rather the inverse. It will be a reduced to what it really is - a tool, and effectively hidden from both the developers and the end-user. Web 2.0 is going to be the next 'dot.com' wave The Web 2.0 driven community is going to start our next big dot.com wave. Although it will not be as big as the first one and the money involved will be "