January 2012
3 posts
3 tags
Interview with a M-Pesa User in Kenya
M-Pesa is a mobile-phone based money transfer service. Currently it’s mainly used in East Africa.
Here a short interview I did with a driver in Kenya about how he uses M-Pesa.
What do you use M-Pesa for? I can send money to my wife, and I can pay bills.
Can you also use it to pay at stores? Yes, you can, but I don’t do that. I mainly use it for transferring money.
How does it...
2 tags
UX Book Club Switzerland Review: "Mobile First"
The first UX Book Club Switzerland in 2012 took place in the new office of Ginetta in Zürich. Usually about 6 people attend one meeting. This time, there were 18 people attending - a new record! A lot of new people joined the book club. Whether it was due of the new platform we used (Meetup.com) or due to pure coincidence is not clear.
We discussed the book “Mobile First” by Luke...
1 tag
Viseca contact form #3: A form field with 2 parts
After post #1 and #2 about the contact form by the Swiss credit card company Viseca, there is still room for a third post: The form contains a form field for entering your credit card account number.
The account number normally starts with “1107” so you are tempted to enter a “7” in the first field. But the first field is not editable, it’s read only. So possibly the customer is supposed...
December 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Viseca contact form #2: How to design a birthday...
My last blog post was about the yellow checkbox in this contact form by the Swiss credit card company Viseca, but wait: there’s more. The next hurdle in contacting them is a birthday form field. First of all I’m confused that they need my birthday date for a simple inquiry, but that’s another story.
1. On a Mac with Firefox the form-field is not long enough to show a full birthday date like...
3 tags
Viseca contact form #1: A yellow checkbox?
When I first saw this contact form by the Swiss credit card company Viseca, I thought “A yellow checkbox? What is that supposed to mean?” Then I figured out that this possibly means it is selected. A selected checkbox should look like a checkbox and not like a yellow box. This is a well-known convention across the web.
When there are good conventions, don’t be creative and...
November 2011
1 post
3 tags
Metaphors: Personas are bright light and...
Metaphors are an important tool when communicating with project members or customers who don’t have strong knowledge of UX and usability methods.
Here two of my favorite metaphors, both from the book Designing for the Digital Age by Kim Goodwin
Personas are “the bright lights under which we do surgery”. They help us to see more clearly, but they’re no replacement for...
October 2011
1 post
4 tags
E-books in the Kindle App have some bad typography
Some e-books are very hard to read in the Kindle App (iPad or iPhone doesn’t matter).
E.g. Gamestorming by Dave Gray , see the following screenshot from the iPad-Kindle-App:
Which heading is on a higher level? “STRATEGY” or “Context Map”? It’s almost impossible to tell. (Solution: “Context Map” is a super-heading, “STRATEGY” is a...
August 2011
1 post
4 tags
Some quotes to get you thinking
The article “Reimagining HCI: toward a more human-centered perspective” by Liam Bannon in the current Issue of the Interactions Magazine contains a lot of food for thought.
Here an interesting quote by Le Corbusier and commented by William McDonough
Le Corbusier said in the early part of this century that a house is a machine for living in. He glorified the steamship, the airplane,...
July 2011
1 post
2 tags
Survey questions are hard to create
I’m currently reading the book “Understanding Users: A Practical Guide to User Requirements Methods Tools and Techniques” by Catherine Courage & Kathy Baxter. In “Chapter 8: Surveys” they talk about how hard it is to create survey questions. Now check out this example question from page 326, where you are only allowed to choose one answer.
Is there something...
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
UX Book Club #9 - Storytelling for User Experience
We met in the atmospheric bar Sphères, where you can also buy books. A perfect place for our ux book club. Even though it’s a bit loud there, it was still possible to understand each other.
Here some points that came up during the discussion:
Some members felt that the book leaves you with the feeling that the most important part is to practice storytelling and there are too few...
April 2011
2 posts
5 tags
Belt by ESPRIT: impossible to read the price
I don’t know what they have thought, when they created this price tag at ESPRIT:
The price is hidden at the top of the price tag.
3 tags
Review of "Designing for the digital age" by Kim...
For the UX Book Club Switzerland, we decided to shoot for the moon by starting the year with “Designing for the digital age: How to create human-centered products and services” by Kim Goodwin. It’s one hell of a book: It has about 700 pages, weights almost 2 kilos and the dimensions are 23 x 19 x 4 (!) cm.
We decided to do 3 meetings to talk about the book. Now the second...
March 2011
1 post
3 tags
Brilliantly designed tea bags by Tetley
A great example, how an everyday object like a tea bag can be improved. With the ingenious “Drawstring tea bags” by Tetley, you can enjoy your tea without making a mess:
Watch this video to see them in action:
February 2011
1 post
3 tags
A new way to organize your files: Raskin...
Yesterday we had another interesting talk with the professional group Software Ergonomics/SwissCHI about Raskin. Raskin is an alternative to the “Finder” application on Mac. It directly shows a preview of your files:
Perfect for photographers, graphic designers and video artists As the demonstration showed, Raskin is most useful when you have files which are visually distinct....
January 2011
1 post
2 tags
Display shows which streetcars are handicapped...
This display in Zurich shows when the next streetcar arrives. But not only that, it also shows which streetcars are easy to enter for people in wheelchairs!
A great example of accessibility.
October 2010
3 posts
4 tags
Austrian Airlines Self-Check-In is not that easy
The hardest part of the Self-Check-In Terminal of Austrian Airlines is the beginning. Take a look at the screenshot below. On the left side (blue circle) there is written “Start by entering your ticket or you customer card”. Since I printed out my ticket and don’t have a customer card I was quite confused how to proceed.
A helpful Austrian Airlines employee showed me, that you...
4 tags
How to buy 0 tickets for the airport train in...
If you want to travel from the Vienna Airport to Vienna you possibly take the City Airport Train (CAT). When you buy a single ticket you have the choice to buy 0 tickets. See this screenshot:
Who would want to buy 0 tickets? Maybe this is an Austrian-Specific-Thing?
2 tags
Mobile login page of Xing looks like a phishing...
When you go on your mobile phone to http://www.xing.com (German competitor of LinkedIn) you see the following login-screen:
Below the username- and password-field you need to click the checkbox next to the text “I allow the application access to my data on Xing”.
This is highly confusing for a user, since I expect this kind of microcopy when connecting through a third-party...
August 2010
1 post
3 tags
Review of book "Search Patterns" by Morville &...
The book provides you with the vocabulary and concepts to analyze a search-design and discuss it with others.
If you can overread the verbiage, you are left with a great structured book that you will keep in your shelf for future reference.
We discussed this book in the UX book club Switzerland. You are welcome to join us: http://www.amazee.com/ux-book-club-switzerland
May 2010
1 post
6 tags
Bad error message in SBB-App
The iPhone App of the SBB is to the most part a pleasure to use. But even great apps can have a bad day from time to time. The following error message is a great example how not to write an error message. It tells nothing about the cause of the error, or what the user can do to make the application work again.
“An unknown error happened. Please try again later.”
February 2010
3 posts
1 tag
How to disable the Paypal help center
I posted another guest post on UsabilityBlog hosted by Paul Sherman. Thanks again Paul for letting me do this guest post. If you would like to comment the article, go to the blog post at UsabilityBlog. It will be archived here.
I wanted to get help in Paypal, that’s why I clicked on “Help” and expected to see the help section of Paypal. Instead I saw the following:
All that I read when...
Review Accessibility Talk @ Webtuesday 09.02.2010
How do blind people experience websites and electronic devices? That was the subject of the last webtuesday. One of the presenters René Jaun is blind and gave us some entertaining insights into how blind people see websites, coffee-machines and mobile phones.
Some interesting points:
iPhone 3GS is one of the first phones that is accessable out of the box, because it has a screenreader built-in. ...
4 tags
Safeword token: 5 or S? 0 or O?
If Safeword would have done only 3 usability-tests, they would have seen, that it’s hard to see the difference between the number “5” and the letter “S” or between the number “0” (zero) and the letter “O”.
From some testing until now, I am almost sure that these two characters are always numbers and not letters. But I catch myself regularly...
January 2010
1 post
3 tags
Web 2.0 E-Banking @ UBS
UBS created a contest to get some ideas from the web-aficionados of the Web Monday Zurich for their E-Banking.
I concentrated on ideas that are easy to implement and bring a high value. For example using the past payments as templates:
Feedback is very welcome!
Summary
This whitepaper shows some possible uses of the Web 2.0 concept for UBS. UBS e- banking should concentrate more on...
December 2009
2 posts
Low-cost usability - Redesigning a microwave
Who said usability is expensive? Just moving the order of a few buttons can make all the difference.
See my redesign of a microwave control panel. The main scenario is that someone wants to cook something for a certain time. The order the buttons which need to be pushed for this scenario are shown in the picture below:
By just reordering the buttons, this main task is much easier to handle:
...
3 tags
Socialcast - A bad example for a FAQ (but good...
Each of these lines should be a link to the respective App.. A Google Search did also not lead to the Desktop App, so I didn’t bother and continued to use Yammer, which gives you the desktop-app rigtht during the registration-process.
EDIT - Reaction by Socialcast: A few hours after I wrote the blogpost, the founder of Socialcast contacted me that they had fixed it. I guess he found...
November 2009
1 post
1 tag
World Usability Day in Switzerland
Today is the World Usability Day. In Switzerland there are some events and conferences around the subject usability:
The official event of the UPA in Zurich: Event details (German)
An event in Geneva, organized by the company Telono: Event details
Schweizerischer Tag der Ergonomie in Fribourg: Flyer (German), Event details (German)
Ux-Chuchi in Zurich: Event details
I guess these events are...
October 2009
1 post
3 tags
Usability fail at Flickr
Why don’t they write “http://” as a default value in the text field, if it should be included?
Is their software so inflexible?
Seen here: www.flickr.com/profile_edit.gne
September 2009
4 posts
4 tags
Towards a Swiss usability calendar
There are more and more groups in Switzerland, which are interested in usability. They all organize events, so I thought it would be a good idea to aggregate all these events in one calendar. I chose Google Calendar to do so.
Currently the following groups are aggregated in the calendar:
Usabilitynet.ch, GoogleCal (Software Ergonomics / SwissCHI)
Ux Book Club Switzerland, GoogleCal
Ux Chuchi,...
3 tags
Badly designed trash bin
This trash bin seems to be designed with a paper-wasting persona in mind:
Unfortunately the current offices do not use as much paper any more as 20 years ago. The garbage-part of the trash bin is way too small.
Impact of usability for developers
I found an interesting presentation by Memi Beltrame. Especially one thought is valuable:
Pop ups are easy to implement - Undo is not. Undo requires a well planned process.
Undo is way more user-friendly than pop ups, but it needs a change of the data model in order to be implemented, whereas pop ups can be added easily by a developer after the whole data model was created.
Good usability...
The beginning of the blog
So you reached the beginning of my blog. Looking for more to read?
Check out my earlier posts about usability:
http://www.newsofthefuture.net/index.php?/archives/53-Guest-post-on-UsabilityBlog.com-about-LinkedIn.html
http://www.newsofthefuture.net/index.php?/archives/39-Guest-post-on-UsabilityBlog.com-about-Sony-Ericsson-PC-Suite.html
...