Category Archives: Real life usability

The terminology of usability.

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In this article I want to look at terminology and the way usability professionals portray themselves to clients and the general public. There is a growing trend coming from the web design side to refer to everything as UX – short for User eXperience – the most common one being people referring to UX design and calling themselves UX designers. This is an oxymoron. You can’t design what someone experiences. You can test what they experience, which is what UX was about originally.

UX, the way I and many long term usability professionals use it, is all about understanding how users experience the product (web site, app, desktop application, controls on a microwave etc.) so that the results can be fed back into areas such as IxD (Interaction Design), IA (Information Architecture) and visual design in order to refine the existing design of the system and make it more usable to improve the UX of the person who will end up using it. Continue reading →

The usability of living shop bought herbs

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I know, this is somewhat off the norm even for me. Regardless, I do believe some corrections to popularly held beliefs are in order and it would be reasonable to consider this a discoverability issue, handily.

Ok, so you’ve just bought a potted herb from some random supermarket and plonked it on the windowsill in your kitchen. So far all the advice I’ve heard from TV chefs, cookery books & magazines and friends is that these plants have been very poorly looked after by the supermarket supply chain and will only last a few days, so you want to use it up fairly quickly. A stance not entirely dismissed by the fact they normally have a Best Before date on the plastic sleeve they usually arrive in. Well, I’m here to dispel that myth. Continue reading →

Publish and be damned (apparently).

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I’ve just been distinctly annoyed by the habit of companies refusing to make pricing available on their website, asking you to “call them” so they can “discuss your needs” with them. Now, there are clearly some areas of business where this is necessary, mostly where the product will be built to your specification and the cost will vary as a result or where it’s a service offering where the cost depends on the amount of time spent carrying out the work. However, there are many situations where it’s an off-the-shelf product where the company in question are nothing more than a reseller of a boxed product … and they still refuse to make pricing easy to come by.

For the purposes of this article, I will focus on those unaltered off-the-shelf products where pricing is simple and easy to make available without effort. Even when pricing may be tiered depending on the volume of business you give them per purchase or per quarter in total volume, they still know how much they’re going to charge you and if they can work it out to generate an invoice, why are they unable to place such basic information on a website? Continue reading →

What a wonderful user experience!

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It’s so rare I get a chance to write an article about a good user experience that I feel all warm and squishy about it. So here goes…

Yesterday evening I was sitting in the COSCA Counselling Skills course I’ve recently started and we were having a discussion about the books listed as indicative reading and which were the most important to read. There are a fair number on the list and most people simply wouldn’t have the time to work through them all. Continue reading →

The new Riverside Museum, Glasgow, Scotland

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Glasgow gained a new home for its museum of transport at the start of the summer. A wonderful architectural work by the legendary Zaha Hadid, the Riverside Museum is now open for all to visit and I have recently completed in excess of 20 hours at and near the building in order to assess the space for usability. I’m doing this of my own accord rather than having been contracted for it – which means I get to post my results to the wider world! :)

The reason for this is simple: I have started to look at how I can expand my usability skills and services to include spaces in addition to web sites, software and real world items. A brand new public museum is the ideal testing ground to work out both the analysis stage and how to report it, so that’s the reason and location covered. Continue reading →

Danger! High Voltage

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I’m not going to get into the nature of the title, you’re either going to get the reference and throw things at me or you won’t – and probably still throw things at me. Let me set the scene: I was in the West End of Glasgow near the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and had just finished lunch in the excellent restaurant, Firebird, with a friend. We had been diving into cafés all morning as there had been regular short-lived, but rather heavy, showers. As we were waiting for a particularly heavy shower to pass before leaving Firebird and walking in to the centre of Glasgow to meet more friends, we decided that there was little chance of completing the thirty minute walk into the centre without becoming drenched, so we walked to the nearby Kelvinhall underground station instead. For those of you wondering what the underground is, you may be more familiar with terms like subway or metro. Continue reading →

The design of a confusing light switch.

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Last night I attended a Scottish Usability Professionals’ Meeting with an excellent talk and group discussion lead by Andy Bright of tattie+toppin which was hosted by Scottish Enterprise in Edinburgh. While there I had to use the facilities (apparently that’s a polite way to say I went to the toilet…) and discovered a very irritating light switch design. I’ll apologise for the poor photography up front, you would never know I’m also a professional photographer when I’m using the camera in my phone! Continue reading →

The usability of trains.

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This morning I was travelling to a client site and, as it’s Friday and I really could not be bothered with the traffic over the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow, I decided to take the train instead of drive. This is quite a normal option for me these days as I find it more relaxing and get some time to read. This morning was no different to any other journey. I parked my car on a side street near Lenzie station and enjoyed a pleasant walk in with the warming sun at my side, bought my tickets from the automated machine on the platform (which is going to have an entire article on its own one day soon) and boarded the train when it arrived a couple of minutes later. After approximately twelve minutes and several pages further on in A Project Guide to UX Design, the train arrived at Glasgow Queen Street and I began to walk to Glasgow Central for the train to Giffnock where my clients are conveniently located just around the corner. Continue reading →

Pondering the usability of a credit card.

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I find myself wondering at their simplistic design while carrying such an important and complex function. A small, thin, rectangular piece of plastic with a few punched out words and sequences of numbers, a magnetic strip and, increasingly, a small almost square chip embedded within their upper surface layer. It seems like such an incredible feat of design that they provide such functionality and carry such a large amount of information while remaining such an unobtrusive object so easily carried by so many people.Yet it would seem I’m not quite so easily won over. I look at these plastic wonders and think “what a poor design this is… how have they managed to continue to be used for so long without making any attempt to improve their usability?” so it seems only reasonable that I lay out my primary concern for your consideration and, with a little bit of luck, to get you thinking just that little bit more about how the design of an everyday object affects how you use it. Continue reading →