Blog articles about Innovation
By Charmaine, 24 February, 2010
Steven Levy has written an article on Google, it's a bit of a potted history of some of its developments over the years and reliance on research gathered from users in real time searches (it is written with quite a 'pro' slant, so you won't find any reference to how users feel about having all of their search data captured). It describes some testing methods, ways in which attempts are made to better understand natural query language and the continual modifications made without disrupting users. I found the time-line listing key advances since 1997 quite interesting.
“Google is famously creative at encouraging these breakthroughs; every year, it holds an internal demo fair called CSI -- Crazy Search Ideas -- in an attempt to spark offbeat but productive approaches. But for the most part, the improvement process is a relentless slog, grinding through bad results to determine what isn't working.”
'How Google's Algorithm rules the web' – Steve Levy, Wired Magazine – Feb 22 2010)
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Posted in Innovation,
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 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, 13 November, 2007
Paul Cruse, Stamford founding Director and Principal Consultant, has written the attached white paper. The paper is based on a recent presentation to our Canberra clients and covers the history and subsequent evolution of government intranets in Australia.
Next Generation Intranets for Government
PDF (750kb)
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Posted in Innovation,
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,
