Blog articles about Design
By Andrew, 2 September, 2010
We’re excited to see Australian Super’s new retirement income calculator launched this week. It helps someone understand what their retirement will be like from a financial sense and what they can change to influence it.
We designed the calculator in collaboration with end users, the client and the developers in an Agile environment. Calculating income in retirement is a complex process with many inputs and assumptions required to spit out a useful result. We found that people didn't want to enter their life's story into a huge form in order to see a result. They wanted to get going quickly, view a result which was meaningful and engaging enough to allow further tweaking to modify their forecast. This required an interactive model with layered panels (aka. Bubbles!) to further customise the results as more data is collected.
So the result was:
- An upfront screen asking the bare minimum - every field on here had to fight for its place, gradual engagement is the thinking.
- A colour coded chart to present and change the information, backed up by numbers.
- Multiple layers of interaction with the chart to allow further customisation.
The dynamic online calculator lets you check how much money you’ll have to live on post-retirement. The design allows you to take into account both single and combined savings; see how changing your retirement age impacts your future lifestyle; and work out how the pension will impact your future income.
Check it out on the Australian Super website. http://www.australiansuper.com/campaigns/RetirementCalculator.aspx
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Posted in Design,
By Lisa Wade, 2 September, 2010
My two year old daughter happily uses my iPhone every day. She quickly navigates to her favourite games, and loves to flick through our family photos.
Last night she was watching me browsing through some photos on my laptop, which she knows is off limits. Apparently I wasn’t browsing through the photos fast enough for Matilda. She quickly put her finger to the screen and dragged it to the left to try to slide to the next pic. Yes, there was a bit of a tanty when she got frustrated that it wasn’t working the same way it works on my phone.
For someone who’s never used a mouse or a touchpad before but is comfortable with the iPhone, using her finger to interact with the screen is a really logical way to interact with the new technology. Matilda’s expectation was that her finger would enable her to interact with the screen, just like it does on the iPhone. As designers, I know we try to think about what the user already knows and what their expectations are, and then try to build upon that. Seeing Matilda trying to drag the laptop screen with her finger reminded me how important it is to consider the Principle of Least Astonishment in design. Users build expectations really quickly, so it’s critical that designs are consistent to minimise the number of surprises for the user.
If you feel surprised or astonished when interacting with technology, it’s generally because the experience is a departure from your expectations. We can apply this to experience design in the offline world too. I was recently astonished by my energy provider who were unable to generate a bill for me for more than 6 months, despite my repeated requests for an invoice. This was a huge departure from my expectations, which were based on previous experiences with services from energy providers. Naturally it left me astonished, surprised and disappointed with the experience.
Here are a few quick and easy ways we can address the principle of least astonishment in UI design:
• Grouping like objects together
• Placing the same buttons in the same location across different screens
• Using the same labelling and terminology in content
• Using colour consistently throughout a design.
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Posted in Design,
By Ruth Ellison, 27 October, 2008
I've been a bit behind in posting about the fantastic Web Directions South 08 conference, which was held in Sydney in September 2008. I first started attending the conference back in 2004 where I experienced a great sense of 'home' and community. This year, I was given the opportunity to present about something I'm very passionate about - accessibility and the user experience.
The basis of the presentation is how we can develop accessible web products by takinga holistic approach to web accessibility. This means moving beyond the principles of web standards, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines andother accessibility guideline and looking at differentways of incorporating accessibility into the design process to produceaccessible and useful user experiences. My three key themes for the presentation were:
- Consider accessibility and usability right from the start
- Involve users throughout the process
- Accessibility is more than checklists and standards - it's about the people
It's about achieving a better understanding of how people interact with your products in the context of their day to day environments, which can be done via a range of user research techniques and testing/evaluation techniques.
You can check out the full presentation below.
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Posted in Conferences, Design, Usability,
By Di Pierce, 2 September, 2008
Ruth Ellison & Adrian Newton presented to the Local Government WebNetwork Conference 2008 on the topic of improving service delivery via the implementation of usability in Government. This presentation highlights theimportance of usability and user-centred design and provides practicaltips for improving much more than just the look and feel of yourwebsite.
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Posted in Conferences, Design, Usability,
By Amir Ansari, 5 May, 2008
While reading the book on personas (by the way, this blog isn't about personas!) entitled "The User Is Always Right" by Steve Mulder and Ziv Year, I came across a website that tabulates 200 years of baby names and ranks them in popularity.
Now, before visiting the website, you might envisage a big table of names, or some dynamic table where you select the year from a drop-down list and it ranks by baby name, or you select a name from a drop-down list, and it shows you the ranking for each year. Instead, I found that the website presented this data in a visual way that is not only clear and concise, but dynamic and interactive, providing an enjoyable user experience. Now, while I can think of some improvements to the interactivity of the graph, holistically it is quite clever.
The baby name page also provided a link to yet another amazing website with examples of other data visualisations. On this site my favourites are the "Thinking Machine", "Market Map" and "Many Eyes".
In my 10 years of usability consulting experience, it remains rare to get an opportunity to really push boundaries through applying unorthodox technologies and techniques to achieve a project's objectives. It is actually common for clients to be fairly conservative in their approach. They invest extensively in us to supply their online technology solutions, expecting a result that looks good, provides a rich user experience, but has some level of conservatism in order to satisfy internal politics, branding needs and other pre-requisites.
As user experience professionals, I believe it is our duty to push those boundaries on behalf of our clients. We should constantly evolve our creativity and continually question ways in which users expect to interact with and experience the online world, now and into the future. Happily, we seem increasingly to be getting our way. Client conservatism appears to be giving way to a broader acceptance of innovation, and we are now often asked by clients to help them think creatively about novel techniques for using the web and other technologies.
Visiting the two sites above has reminded me that there are clever people out there doing clever things. We should always keep a look out for new and different user interaction solutions so that we can make use of them... and hopefully take them further.
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Posted in Design, Innovation,
By Lisa McArley, 2 May, 2008
An incident in a car park this week got me thinking about the nature of
signs and the importance of placing them at the right point in the
journey. I'm not talking about labeling
here, the signs made perfect sense; the problem here was timing.
Signposts are there to ultimately get us to our destinations quickly,
safely and with the least amount of wrong turns or dead ends. Sometimes however signposts send us to the
wrong destination and, in this case, literally up against a brick wall. After parking in the underground car park, I
got out of the car and took several confident steps towards the large,
prominent sign saying "lifts". Then I
stopped. As I had got closer another
sign became visible that directed people to two different lifts, the public
lifts and the club lifts. I wanted the
public lifts so I followed the arrows, and that's when I hit the brick wall. Back I went to the first sign to check the
direction. No, I was definitely following
the signs...to a dead end. Looking up the
car ramp I could see the lifts within tantalizing reach but there were large
signs prohibiting pedestrians on the ramp.
In the other direction, I could see stairs, but they were going down and
I needed to go up. So there I was, seemingly
literally stuck between a rock and a hard place.
This experience got me thinking about the importance not just of proper sign
labeling, but of placement and destination. At what point in the site journey do we place
the sign to the next step we want users to take? When do we give them signs to other destinations? Through testing and working with users, I
have learned to place signs (such as registration calls-to-action or related
information details) at the point in the journey where users are most receptive
to them. Sometimes this might be at the
start, but sometimes it's after they've done a little bit of exploring on their
own and are ready to look for, or be prompted with, that next step. Take the example of someone arriving at a
product site and being forced to register before they can browse items or add
them to their basket (yes, this still happens).
Forcing people to register before they've decided its worth their while
will only drive users to other sites where shopping is easier. Sites should also allow users to choose
whether to register (because there's an advantage in doing so, like saving time
on repeat purchases) or to simply make the transaction (including bill payment)
without registering.
Likewise, hitting people with information about hotels when they've
arrived at the flight search page is a little premature but showing them that
information after they've booked a
flight is helpful because they're now ready to take the next step in their
travel arrangement process.
So, did I get out of the car park?
Yes, I took my chances with the vehicles and walked up the cars-only
ramp to the lifts. The door into the
lift foyer had no affordance, but that's a whole other issue, nor did it tell
me what floor I was on (a hazard for the return journey!) but I did manage to
eventually get myself onto the street above.
Moral of the story? Don't send
your users into brick walls. If the
directional sign to the lifts had been placed after I had proceeded down a
flight of stairs, I would have found them easily instead of being deterred too
soon and sent literally up against a brick wall. So think about when and where to give
directions. When will your users be
receptive to further information or calls-to-action? When is the right time to show them secondary
directions? What would be useful to know
now and to where would they like to go?
Remember, it's a lot easier to leave your site than to exit a car park,
so make sure you use signs well.
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Posted in Design, Usability,
By Amir Ansari, 8 January, 2008
How often have you burnt your hand trying to pick up a saucepan by the handle, or touching a hot plate at a restaurant? When it comes to the web, as technologies improve and more and more people (including my mum) start to use the web, people's expectations of website usability increase and comapnies need to respond to stay in the game. Yet, when it comes to consumer products, although technologies have also improved in the fields of metals, plastics etc, we still see so many products on the shelf which could easily have been tweaked to make them more user-friendly . In the example above, it would be simple to incorporate smart materials so that a handle of a saucepan changes colour to inform you that it's hot. Some saucepan manufacturers have incorporated technologies to display a red circle in the middle of the pan telling us it's at the optimum temperature for cooking, so why don't they do the same with their handles to tell us that's it's at the optimum level for... burning your hand!
Here are a few thoughts as to why the consumer product industry has been outstripped by the web industry in instilling usability:
- With millions of websites out there, the competition for people's attention is intense, placing greater pressure on companies to improve their web usability in order to attract and retain users against the competition;
- Specialised organisations and companies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Stamford Interactive exist, defining clear standards for the internet and embodying them in user-friendly websites respectively;
- Users can easily provide feedback to companies and webmasters regarding issues they have with websites, either via a simple email to the webmaster or the completion of a feedback form.
The above three points are not reflected in the consumer goods and manufacturing industries. Although there are many saucepans out there and we have a choice, brand loyalty, country of manufacture, and pricing force us into that choice. Secondly , there are no organisations like W3C in manufacturing of consumer good, and although safety standards exist, they are not really linked in with the usability of the product. Finally, the mechanisms for providing feedback for physical products require far greater effort, and the fact that few of our own consumer products are manufactured in Austaralia users further discourages users to provide their constructive feedback to overseas companies.
Now, I'm not saying that the web has attained a universally high level of usability and we all know there are still countless poor websites out there. It just seems that although the web is still in its infancy, it is already leading the field in terms of both expectation and delivery of usability and user experience.
So what is the solution?
I think we, as consumers, could raise our expectations of manufacturers to provide us with sensible products and be actively engaged in providing feedback for the products we use day to day. We should also learn to be more discriminating about good design, ensuring companies that have put some brain power behind their good products are rewarded for their efforts. This way we can hopefully raise the bar for other manufacturers and over time, reap the benefits of a world full of good, usable products.
As they say, "It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease!"
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Posted in Design, Usability, Innovation,
By Amanda Harding, 22 November, 2007
Ruth Ellison presented to the Canberra Web Standards Group on 12 November 2007 at the National Library of Australia on the topic of Implementing Accessibility in Government. The Web Standards Group is for people who are interested in web standards and best practices. There are currently over 5000 members from 112 countries.
Ruth took a look at some things to be aware of when implementing accessibility in an Australian Government context, from organisational level issues to people and technology challenges.
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Posted in Conferences, Design,
By Stephen Zafir, 31 October, 2007
Just as the World Wide Web brought each of us access to millions of points of content around the world, Web 2.0 now mobilises the information and allows us to interact with it. Social networking and folksonomies offer an engaging new level of connection between people and ideas. Like all innovative technologies, however, they represent a great set of concepts and features, but not necessarily the full realisation of their potential. As user-centred designers, it is our role to understand the extended meaning and potential of these innovations so that we can apply the approaches and learnings to the real-world requirements of our customers and their users. For example, the use of tagging, tag clouds and organic information hierarchies points to a new way forward for traditional Information Architecture. Although traditionally most company websites or intranets are a static proposition, each user brings a unique approach to the information. Consequently, even a good static Information Architecture represents a compromise between the different mental approaches brought to the website or intranet by the range of users. Allowing users to tag information elements essentially creates an evolving categorisation model whereby users can form their own logical relationships across existing information structures. These relationships can then be utilised in two ways;
- By the system, to provide a mechanism for direct linking to related elements.
- By the Information Architect, to inform evolution of the Information Hierarchies themselves.
In this way traditional, off-line analysis techniques for Information Architecture (such as card-sorting etc.) can be augmented by new on-line information, provided by real users whilst engaged in day-to-day interactions with the information. The result may be a measured movement toward more fluid information architectures which, over time, can evolve to reflect the mental approaches of their users.
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Posted in Design, Innovation,
