26
Jun

Don’t Stop Password Masking

In his Alertbox this week, Jakob Nielsen tells us to Stop Password Masking. He says “It’s time to show most passwords in clear text as users type them”. It’s not something that I’ve ever thought of and I like the thinking but I don’t agree with it.

Jakob bases his rationale on the fact that there is usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in so masking the password is only serves to increase the chance of user error. But what about the times when somebody is looking over your shoulder. What do you do then? Jakob says that you should add a checkbox to your login form so that people can choose whether to mask their password. I think this adds unnecessary weight to the login form – another thing for the user to consider when logging in.

What about the registration form? There’s usually nobody peering over your shoulder when you’re registering so it seems like a more reasonable place to display passwords in clear text. By doing so you could remove the need for the retype password field but I wonder how much of the username + password + retype password pattern users look for when scanning a registration page (that often also contains a login box).

It seems that Jakob’s thinking is based on things he’s observed while testing mobile devices. I agree that typing passwords on a mobile device can be tricky because of the small format keyboard but I wonder if it isn’t the responsibility of the operating system or hardware to solve that particular problem. The iPhone does a great job of both masking and displaying a password – but that’s done on the phone, not the website.

It’s a tricky one but the fact that I’ve never thought of it as a problem and have never observed or read about anyone actually complaining about it leads me to conclude that it ain’t broke so let’s not fix it.

What do you think?

By Rob Scherer 1 Comment
Categories: Uncategorized, design, usability and user experience
13
May

Saving the World – One Purchase at a Time

Photo showing juxtaposition of rich and poor

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While not a post about user experience per se, I figure that as it’s about our user experience of life, it’s relevant to this blog. That, and I’ve really got nowhere else to post it.

What if we could save the world by buying stuff? It’s a thought that popped into my head this evening and the more I think about it, the more it seems like a winner. It seems odd that it hasn’t already been done, so I’m sure there’s something glaringly obvious that I’m missing. Perhaps you, dear reader, can tell me what it is. If not, then let’s do it.

The idea is that non profit organisations operate as normal businesses, with all profits going to charity. I’m not talking about your traditional NPO that does work for a particular cause, I’m taking about a normal business that is different only because of where the profits go.

What is stopping a business like this from operating in every sector and industry? Look at your big banks, they’re make billions of dollars profit – even during these tough times. Westpac’s net profit for the six months to March 31 2009 was $2.175 billion!

From a consumer point of view, I reckon people would be queueing up to move their business to organisations that gave their profits to charity. I’d bank with “The Charity Bank” as long as I knew it was a well run and regulated bank and that $2.175 billion was going to charity every 6 months. I’d do my grocery shopping at Worldworths. I’d stay at Shareiton hotels. I’d by petrol from Better Planet (BP).

And, as far as competition goes, prices would be lower than those of ‘normal’ competitors because NPOs don’t have to pay income tax like ‘normal’ companies do and there’s no shareholder pressure to raise prices or fees to make a bigger profit. You’d get a better deal as a customer AND you’d be helping people by purchasing.

With an NPO operating like this in every market, industry and sector, there’d be so much money going to good causes that we could do something about distributing wealth more effectively and giving to people all over the world.

Why does this seem so obvious? What am I missing?

By Rob Scherer 1 Comment
Categories: charity and design
30
Jul

Design in a Corporation

UPDATE: I found another version.

UPDATE: The video has been removed from YouTube which is sad. I’ll try to track down another version.

What would happen if a large corporation had to design the stop sign? This video has a look at “The Process” with an alarming result!

By Rob Scherer 0 Comments
Categories: design, marketing and video
27
Mar

Brand Or User Experience?

I’ve been pondering an interesting question today. In designing a new application which displays the status of an item in three states; ‘available’, ‘unavailable’ or ‘mine’, I’ve had to think of which colours to use to indicate the state.

The team here are divided. 1/2 think that as the application needs to convey a number of states to the user, the choice of colour needs help the user build a mental model. There people are leaning towards the green is available, yellow is mine and grey is unavailable. The other 1/2 are in favour of using the brand colours (pink and blue) to convey available/unavailable. All agree that grey is a good colour for unavailable.

My preference is for the yellow/green approach but I’m certainly no marketer.

What do you think? Is there a reason why you would favour one approach over the other?

By Rob Scherer 2 Comments
Categories: color, design, interaction and user experience
28
Sep

6 Reasons Why I am Over Facebook

Facebook was a bit of fun for a while. I resisted joining for a long time and then joined, primarily to check out what all of the fuss was about and to research the platform. I quickly built a network of friends (some who I see in the real world and some I haven’t seen for ages. 2 months later, I’m REALLY over it. Heres 6 reasons why:

  1. Relationships aren’t so simple

    2. I have a bunch of relationships with people I deal with, am friends with, live with, see rarely etc.. Each of those relationships has its own dynamic and no 2 relationships are the same. Facebook over simplifies the whole relationship dynamic, meaning that everyone who you are connected with is of equal importance. Sure, there are some simple algorithm governing what goes into your news feed, but generally, the people who’s news fills my feed aren’t the people who I would prefer to fill my feed. I have actually adjusted my Newsfeed Preferences to receive less news about some people, but I still receive a heap of news about them.

  2. Too much SPAM

    3. I hate the fact that I have to wade through a sea of crap each time I review my inbox or notifications. Zombie invites, Jedi invites, Pirates invites etc. I couldn’t care less about some stupid game that someone in my network thought might be cool and was peompted by the application to SPAM everyone within coo wee!

    All of a sudden application developers (read new age SPAMmers) are able to abuse people’s networks by virally sending out invitations to people’s friends en masse.

  3. I don’t want to install an application just to read a message

    4. Those emails telling me that someone has written on my X Wall, when I don’t even have the X Wall application installed. Install application, read some message that is crap and not solely written to me. Uninstall application, untill the next time someone else does the same thing.

  4. Sponsored ads in Newsfeed

    5. It’s my news feed. Not an ad feed!

  5. IS

    6. Why does the status update have to start with IS. Why can’t I say Rob hates five things about Facebook instead of Rob is hating 5 things about facebook!

  6. All those people

    7. How many contacts can you say you’ll actually stay in contact with? It’s great to see and hear from people you haven’t seen for ages, but generally, after the initial “Hi, how’s it? what’s been happening for the past 10 years? you married? got kids? oh how cool!” kinda stuff, those people will sit in your friends list, neglected. No way to piff someone without upsetting them. It all becomes too noisy, very quickly.

I’ve started a Facebook group about being over Facebook. Will people join or will they get over it first?

By Rob Scherer 0 Comments
Categories: Uncategorized, facebook, social networks, user experience and web 2.0
13
Aug

Networks and Their Effect on Marketing

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how technology has changed the way we live. Last night, I called my mum at home. No answer. I then called her mobile. No answer. I sent her an SMS and she called me this morning. It made me think about how we used to contact people. Before answering machines and mobile phones, we used to call back, and call back and call back – until someone answered the phone. Today, we just make sure there is some record of our ping, and the ball is then in the pingees court.

Something else I am thinking about is how marketing must change in order to be effective in this time of social networks and mass connectiveness. People are now connected to their friends en masse, all the time! Need to have a question answered? Post it to Facebook and have a bunch of responses within the hour. Where is a good place to get new tyres for my car? Where should we go for dinner tonight, feel like Indian? Which mobile phone should I buy? These used to be the questions that marketers pondered. Need they bother any more? Is anyone listening to marketing anymore or is it all just spam?

Network vs Advertising

I know that I pay much less attention to advertising or marketing than I used to. What I’m not sure about is whether that is because I am becoming older and more cynical wiser or whether I am more inclined to go to my network when I have a decision to make.

I think marketing/advertising is the one area that will suffer a lot from the change in the way people make decisions, but then again, I suppose the US$550 million that MySpace made from advertising revenue last year may counter that assertion.

What do you think?

By Rob Scherer 0 Comments
Categories: evolution, marketing, myspace, social networks and web 2.0
10
Aug

When Users Matter

I recently attended a great course – Designing With Users – at Hiser. While the majority of the concepts covered in the course were not new to me, the way that Hiser work them into a process for bottom up requirements gathering was fantastic. From user interviews/site visits, through affinity diagramming, collaborative design and ultimately user testing, you could really get a sense that the process ensures the end product is in line with both business and user needs.

Having just completed a project with Hiser, I was very impressed with their process, methodology, professionalism and documentation. Although we haven’t yet developed the product they assisted us with, you get the feeling that it will be well received by users and will have a positive impact on the business. The research and collaborative design process has ironed out issues with the interface and further testing closer to launch should ensure that the product is fit for purpose and well received.

Contrasting this approach with Facebook’s mini-feed mini-disaster it is clear to me that there is a point in every business (especially a Web 2.0 startup) where what has always worked suddenly fails. It is not possible or necessary for a startup to invest as much in research and UCD as a larger business with established clients. The mantra of the 2.0 startup has been “Deploy, test, refine”. But, what is the catalyst that changes that? In Facebook’s case it was the revolting (as in up in arms, not disgusting) users who were very rapidly very many.

It’s not surprising at all that Facebook’s designers were out of touch with who their users were and what they wanted. In the incredibly rapid growth do you think anyone at Facebook had the time or inclination to slow things down by doing some formal user profiling or research. Facebook has been all about geting it out. Fast!

What this case highlights is that at some stage, the users suddenly matter a whole lot more than they previously did. I doubt that there will be any long term damage to the Facebook brand as a result of this, but I’ll bet that they have started to think a lot more deeply about the implications of their deployments and will be more rigorous in their research and testing with users.

By Rob Scherer 0 Comments
Categories: design, evolution, interaction, user experience and web 2.0
30
Jul

It’s Not the Fold That Matters. It’s What You Do With It

Some great research on user scrolling behaviour breaks down the age old (well, since 1994) necessity to squeeze everyting important ‘above the fold’. The research makes sense but as I’ve learned, not everything that makes sense is accepted by business people when they demand their content appears ‘above the fold’.

Content and structure are still vitally important, but with well segmented (chunked) content and a design that supports scanning, I have finally found some research that will help reduce the need to “get it above the fold”.

By Rob Scherer 0 Comments
Categories: design, interaction and user experience
08
Jun

London 2012. Crikey!

It’s bad, it’s really bad. The 2012 Olympics brand (it’s more than a logo according to the organisers) has arrived with a price tag of 400,000 GBP. So, what did they get for their million bucks? A hideousley gnarled, flourescent, epilepsy inducing abomination that is the laughing stock of the globe.

OMFG!

Anyone else think that the bit with the rings in it looks like a map of Australia? They even put the ‘TM’ where TasMania should be. How thoughtful!

If you want to work with a ‘brand’ for your olympic games, how about grabbing those rings, slapping 2012 and London on them. Can I have a million please?

By Rob Scherer 0 Comments
Categories: design and negative
02
May

Digg Users are Revolting

Digg front page 1 May 2007Amazing events on Digg today with users up in arms over Digg removing a post linking to those numbers (09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0) that the MPAA don’t want us to see. All activity on the front page of Digg is around posts linking to the #.

I find it amazing that Digg would even try to censor something that is:

  1. In the public domain
  2. So close to the hearts of its community (MPAA bashing)

I don’t think this will have any long term effect on Digg, it will return to normal over the next couple of weeks (yes, I think it will take a little while to settle down) but I think it will have an enormous impact on Web 2.0, user generated and the legal responsibility of a service provider to moderate, control and govern its users.

A lot of organisations will now think twice before giving users as much power as they have been given by the first wave of user generated sites.

Things will change. Web 2.0 has just grown up.

Viva la revolution!

Update: Digg have given up moderating and have decided to go down fighting. I think that may be the end.

By Rob Scherer 0 Comments
Categories: copyright, digg and web 2.0
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