Slide about quantifying desirability - Like whoa ...

His original presentation and blog article have links to the PDF, as well as a link to buying the presentation for $70 or so.  We watched the presentation at work and it’s … not great for a group audience. The slides read better than they are presented, but I can’t fault Christian for this .. just the sheer amount of good content is overwhelming.

User Experience Leader Christian Rohrer provides a framework for understanding and explaining different user research methods, delves into details on a few of the lesser-known methods, such as desirability and true intent studies, and discusses key insights to succeed in modern-day corporate environments.

PDF download

There have been high profile attempts at designing new, complete, usable components to solve specific problems such as interactive assistants and horribly bloated CD lists.  But in recent memory, all pale in comparison to the Ribbon that Microsoft introduced in Office 2007.  The Ribbon is what replaced the toolbar system used in previous versions of Microsoft Office.

The ribbon effectively solves the problem of displaying the functionality of a very complex and feature-rich piece of software like Word or PowerPoint much more effectively than toolbars, tabs, and other competing concepts.   In combination with gallery views of icons, and organising things in use-driven groups, the solution is elegant and ages well.  It’s unfortunate (read: fucking brutal) that Microsoft is patenting this idea in the current climate of software openness and growth, but I digress.

Jensen Harris did a presentation at MIX ’08 about the history of Office and how the ribbon was developed.  A must watch for any employed interface designer:  the ideas about religious tenets, building lots of high-fidelity prototypes,  evaluation over a number of months, and constraining ideas to make reasonable decisions are worth discussing.

YouTube video below, but the complete presentation is available from Microsoft.

Rather than offering an extensive review, I wanted to share some first thoughts.

Arrival

I was extremely happy to find out that the packaging it was shipped in was both secure and minimal: very few things came in the box, and the box itself was small enough to hold with one hand.  The Mini 10v doesn’t have a DVD drive, but it came with a copy of Windows XP and the restore disks anyways.  Hurray!  That fact got a few chuckles in the office.

The AC adapter is not a brick, but instead, looks like my Nokia cell phone charger!  Very nice.  Those brick monsters with two cords make portable laptops oxymoronic.

First Boot

The Mini 10v I ordered came with Windows XP SP3.   I use XP at home and at the office, so it’s cool, but I’m wondering what happened to Vista.  Where is my voucher for Windows 7?  This is an eight (8!!) year old Operating System.   I will be looking into the Ubuntu 9 Netbook Remix very shortly.

The netbook doesn’t come with Microsoft Office unless you’ve installed it, but I’m very glad to have Microsoft Works with the Office 2007 compatibility pack installed by default.  But this is insane: Internet Explorer 6.  IE6 is the default browser – the broken one circa August 2001.  I honestly feel like I’ve been cheated, and need to speak to someone at Dell about it.

More immediately, some fixable things were show-stoppers:

• The “function keys”, (Fn-F7 to mute, for example) were not installed.  This took me a while to figure out, I just thought they weren’t responding or something.   After navigating the Dell website, I found the utility (or via FTP) and installed it.  Very bad form, Dell.
• Windows is installed with 120dpi fonts by default on the Mini 10v.  I love this font setting on my big LCD monitor at home or at work, but on the 1024×576  screen, this is bad news.  Most notably many dialogs cut off on the bottom.  In the Dell Wireless utility I could not press “Apply”, “OK”, “Cancel” without blindly pressing Tab and Enter.  So after changing the font size to 96dpi, and restarting, the dialogs became useful again.
• The preference for “Large  Icons” out of the box is … questionable given the small screen. Cranking down the icon size is available in the Display Properties.

Hardware

Out of the box, the hardware looks and feels way slicker than I expected it to.  It doesn’t suffer from the same “hollow rattle” as some of the old Dell laptops I’ve owned or used; it feels solid and well put-together. The screen hinges particularly stand out as being hard-effing-core.  Having three USB ports is pretty great.

My only concerns are about the touchpad and the screen glare.  The screen is shiny.  I mean SHINY.  I’m sitting here between two other laptops and my LCD, and the Mini 10v is a mirror compared to the other devices.  Hopefully this subsides over time and fingerprints.

More seriously, clicking touchpad buttons is straight up frustrating.  The touchpad looks great, and the material is nice.  Akin to the Apple touchpad, there are no segregated buttons,  and clickable areas are in the bottom right and bottom left.  This sounds great, but the execution is poor (and perhaps can be improved with some driver tuning).   Once you move your finger over to the bottom left to “click” you inevitably end up moving the cursor about a third of the time.   If I do the tasks seperately, it works fine .. but when navigating normally, it’s a constant bother.

Performance

One small note about performance: coming from full-powered dual core machines, going to netbooks is an adjustment.  One recommendation I ignored is splurging for the 2GB upgrade.  I immediately regret that decision.  Do it: buy the 2GB of RAM.

The wireless performance with the Interl (802.11n) adapter is really great, and better (in terms of -db readings) than with my 2 year old, full size Dell Inspiron.

If you do have 2GB of RAM, turn off the page file.    I’ve noticed this is particularly great on laptops that crawl if the 5400RPM mini-drive trird to page a few hundred megabytes of stuff.  I turned off the page file on my 1GB Mini.  It’s noticably more responsive when switching between applications (Firefox, Messenger, and Microsoft Works, for now), but this puts an aggressive cap on the work that you can do simultaneously.

More to come!

The poster is incredibly rich with information.  It goes through analysis, field studies, creating user profiles, documenting requirements, designing, verifying with users, prototyping, implementation, heuristics, usability testing, and the rest of the steps.

The 11×17″ poster [PDF] is just as detailed as the full-sized one.

As found on mprove.de.

The Problem – It’s not uncommon for someone who does real work with the corporate intranet to have several tabs open within their web browser with data sources, and a webmail tab. Add to that desktop applications like Microsoft Excel, and an instant messaging client, and we have broken workflow in Alt-Tab.

This effect will become more pronounced as more and more applications that we use daily sneak into the web browser – unless we launch everything from Adobe Air or Gears shortcuts on the desktop. That is not the case, since I’m much more likely to get to Google Calendar by clicking an Add this GCal link, than I am to launch it from my desktop.

User Solution – If the user wants to correct this workflow problem, they can open all of their working tabs as new windows.  The major issue with that is pre-loading the cognition of the task.  Odds are the user navigated to their document in an exploratory way, and didn’t precede that activity with the thought “I better open this in a new window just in case I find something I need to task-switch to.”

Last I checked (Firefox 3.0.8), there is no easy way to turn a tab into a new window in Firefox.  At least not without the Tab Mix Plus! add-on (via How-To Geek).   Though I understand “tab tearing” will be included in Firefox 3.1, and is already a standard feature in Google Chrome and Safari 4 (video link).

Potential Solution - The major web browsers that support tabs already support quickly rotating through the tabs using Ctrl-Tab.   Integrating the tab switching functionality (including preview screenshots, tab titles, and all of that) into Alt-Tab would be good.   The specific details of how that would look, feel, and interact would make a  great little M.Sc. topic. :-)

As a side note: The default built-in Alt-Tab application in Windows XP is fine (Vista Flip is even nicer), but there are a handful of better free replacements: one from the Microsoft PowerToys team, and an even richer one from Alex Avdonin.

So step one was to recreate my new resume, with some help from my friends! Step two is to look for openings. So far that has been a challenge, but optimism ensues – emailed abotu ten firms in the last few days that had openings for people like myself. There really are a lot of HCI-focused firms in Toronto and Waterloo, not surprising considering the number of quality soft-dev firms and Comp Sci grad schools in the area.

I went to a TorCHI meeting last week, met some good people there, indicated my interest at getting hired at CIBC or IBM :) Even my housemate has been trying to help me out. She was out with some friends having a drink, and was approached by a nice man who handed her a business card. She realised that he’s into the same thing I’m into, so she gave me the card at home and told me to email the guy. Thanks Kirsti, appreciate the help.

If you know anyone who is hiring or looking for people like me, let me know!