Christopher Bennage : UI, Usability

Designer Wanted

Christopher Bennage — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:30:25 GMT

We need to contract a designer for our current project. I’m looking for one of those mythical beasts that has:

some real graphics design skill
understands (or at least cares about) usability
works with Silverlight

There is also a strong preference for someone in the NYC/NJ area.

If you are interested or know someone who qualifies, please contact me through the blog.

Answer the User’s Questions

Christopher Bennage — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:27:00 GMT

One little usability bit that I picked up from many of the Web 2.0 apps (in particular 37signals apps), is displaying date and times in a “how long since” format.

Take a look at the community page on Silver Arcade. I wanted to display when a user became a member of the community. Instead of displaying the actual date that they signed up, I choose to convert that date to “how long ago”.

At first I did this just because I liked it. Then it began to dawn on me that there are reasons that I like it.

Questions

One primary purpose of any UI is answering the user’s questions. “How much credit is left in this account?” “Is this customer currently active?” “How many days are left before this explodes?”

Frequently, when we are displaying dates and times we are really trying to answer questions that begin with “how long ago did …” or “how soon until …”.

When we display a simple date and time, such as “August 22, 2009 12:11 PM”, we are providing raw data to the user, but we really aren’t answering their question. We’re leaving the final step up to them. That’s translating that raw data into a meaningful answer for their ‘how long’ question. Every translation has a cognitive cost.

This may not seem like much, but the cognitive cost adds up very quickly. This can be one of those subtle points that makes two seemingly similar interfaces feel so different.

I’m not saying to display every date and time in your application in this format. Instead I am saying to ask “what question will my users have and am I really answering it”.

To be fair, this is purely anecdotal and is not backed up with any empirical evidence.

UX Patterns (and not UI Architecture Patterns)

Christopher Bennage — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:19:00 GMT

Just when you think that you finally have an accurate label to describe something, you discover the true ambiguity of the term.

What is UX?

UX means User Experience. You might say that it is the ergonomics of an user interface, or possibly the level of intuitiveness. More plainly, good UX means that the users of the software are able to quickly understand how to use and don’t have to go out of their way to make things happen. This blurs a little bit into the concept Usability. But UX just sounds so much sexier, and there is this aspect of producing chemistry between the user and software that transcends mere Usability.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I’ve just started talking about UI Architecture patterns and I wanted to make sure the concepts were distinct. When I talk about UI architecture patterns I’m talking about the structure of the code that underlies a user interface. It’s all non-visual stuff. On the other hand, UX patterns deal with the rendered view that is presented to the user.

Infragistics just recently published a very cool (and Silverlight-based) catalog of UX Patterns called Quince.

You might be inclined to say, “Well, that’s nice for designers, but…”. Please don’t, this is really a useful for tool for anyone building user interfaces, even if those interfaces are basic and handed off to a design team. In the very least, this will help establish a common vocabulary for talking about user interfaces.

More Resources

If you are interested in know more about UX and usability, here’s a couple of resources:

Jakob Nielsen – very well know and full of good info, but he is definitely plain usability with none of the sizzle.

Don’t Make Me Think – one of the first books I read on the subject. (I probably need to reread it, it’s been so long…)