[Sigia-l] Real World UI Design Failure

[Alexander Johannesen]

Hiya,

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 9:43 AM, Jonathan Baker-Bates
<jonathan at bakerbates.com> wrote:
> Thanks - and thanks also to you for replying! After a blizzard of emails
> recently on this list about the conduct of the list itself, but until now
> not a peep amount my posting, I was beginning to wonder whether information
> design was now too boring to talk about!

Mucking around with conduct is always going to attract more traffic
than most anything else as we're a very gossipy specie, not to mention
an important part of anything that's on the verge of a purge. I think
a lot of people here have the need to clear the waters a bit, as long
as it's done in reasonable taste. I also think that people are slowly
daring to go back into work mode after the big holidays, and in doing
so probably have a slight email overload to deal with as well, so the
backload overload to time to write shop ratio is skewed. Almost there
myself.

> I've written up some stuff about what I think is quite a clear cut failure of mine

I don't think this is as clear-cut as you say here. There's a few
things not talked about here, and the most prominent being if the
features featured in the pinned section is something that people care
about. It was done for the loyalty program, but tested with the
sorting drop-down. People have a tendency to ignore different things
based on the shape of the periphial object itself, and drop-down boxes
are, in my experience, *very* easily overlooked.

Another option I'd investigate more about information shapes which I
think is more relevant here, how the contrast of the pinned area
affects (similar to what you say) not the change of content, but the
context the content floats in. What if you gave the pinned area a
slight zap (you know that "go stronger color, then .5 second fade back
to normal), or changed the color permanently when it goes into pinned
mode?

> So we put them to the right as you see them today. So far the test results
> haven't reached statistical significance so I can't say if that has restored
> their usage yet.

I'd jump in here and note that IMHO the loyalty program logo and text
is *too* much like an ad, and your drop-downs (which has *no* relation
to the ad itself) sit right in that area, which may be another reason
it gets ignored more. There's no clear separation between an ad (even
if it is your own) and crucial functionality as far as I can see (that
little blue line is probably not enough). I know this one is tricky as
it *reasonably* works, I just think you're butting against a
perception of importance (or even context fallout).

> The obvious Achilles heel of bugs invalidating test results
> (which happens rather a lot when you're testing complex UI that deal with
> complex back-ends) is one thing, but the issue of interpretation can also be
> a gigantic problem. This gets exponentially worse the more granular stuff
> you test, as the more fraught subsequent design decisions become, and
> secondary maintenance issues start to proliferate (we recently conducted 8
> weeks of lab studies, during which time the site changed underneath us
> several times).

Hmm, we the obvious thing here is that UX isn't as integrated into the
development cycle as it possible should be, with the added problem of
the time it takes to design and test any substantial UI. The only
thing here is to get everybody on board with all things going through
the same channels in the development cycle, even tiny maintainence
change needs a paranoid UX guy before it gets unleashed.

> I could tell stories of the most Byzantine nature imaginable
> when you're looking at stats while running 20+ concurrent tests in 40
> countries, all reporting pretty different results across several metrics!

Well, as fun as that sounds, there are ways of creating essentially
the same code based system but with culturally contextual differences.
Of course this requires slightly more flexible cycles of development
(like a more complex version of A/B testing. I've developed a couple
of sites that don't use A/B testing as such, but have the underlying
concept built into the site structure, and made contextual based on
different parameters like country, user preferences, market testing,
etc.)

> But on the other hand, the occasional universally clear result of a test can
> sure settle any arguments :-) Would that were a more frequent event is all I
> can say!

Shorter cycles, more testing, long-term cyclic planning of larger
changes. Yeah, when done right and when people get the concepts of
test-driven development (and not the geeky version that only deals
with code) in a more agile environment, life can be pretty good.


Kind regards,

Alexander
-- 
 Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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