The ungrateful task of getting it to work... (Image thanks to Stephen Anderson)

Most of the time I don’t like too woolly theories that practically don’t make any difference at all to what you get. I am sure that a lot of companies that use this theory all the time have a user experience to cry.

Must be: Don’t annoy people

As Steve Krug’s book title: “Don’t make me think” already suggests usability is most about not annoying people and a little bit about delighting people.

At least personally I most of the time choose which app I use based on which one annoys me least. The one that gets me to my objective fastest. Sounds simple, but that is where most of the work is.

It has to be fast, it has to work and it shouldn’t ask you stupid questions.

Delight: Good Usability is just not enough

You can do OK, or you can really get your users hyped up.

Do one thing: change the colour of the background (takes 10 min, right?) of your app. And there you go, reactions will be pretty strong. Take out one step of an often used process: nice, but not such a strong reaction.

Most probably most of your time you are busy on not annoying people, just making it work, but when you have that sorted out (actually before) don’t forget to delight your users. Actually, start with it!

Want to know more?

Check out Stephen Anderson’s presentation on seducing customers.

After done the trip so many times and every time being annoyed by how crap the user experience is of the airport to city trip. I decided to make a small diary of getting off a plane and getting to Barcelona.

The city of Barcelona wants to be a to tourist destination, known for it’s innovation and good design. And I must say things are not going to bad at all. But where as a visitor do you start. Right, at the airport and obviously the first thing you do is get to the city. By Taxi, piece of cake. By public transport; not that easy.

Terminal 1 or Terminal 2

Recently a new terminal has been build in Barcelona. So would this be Terminal 1 or Terminal 2? I would say Terminal 2. NO! Wrong, the new one is Terminal 1! So if there will be a new terminal in a few years I guess we will change it all around again. How much fun.

Call the New Terminal T1? So what if you add another Terminal? Call it T-1, or change it all again?

You arrive, how to get to Barcelona?

Got it, I have found the sign directing to the train/buses. Funnily it is positioned not in the viewing direction so you have to look at every door what the sign above it says. This seems to be a problem at the gates too.

Where are the Gate numbers?

Which Bus/Train?

So I got to the platform where the buses and supposedly trains leave. First of all, let me tell you that Barcelona aiport must be nearly the only one where the main terminal has no train or metro connection to the city. Great. So what to do? You have to take a shuttle bus to T2 (yep, the old one) and take the train there. But which one is the one that takes you to the train?

Nice buses! Interurban(?!), Special Service, Connection (with what?), or the Left and Right Train, Bus?

(maybe I am too sarcastic, you would take the one with the train icon (if you know there is a train line to Barcelona…)

Roundabout Bus!

As every self respecting suburban town you need to have roundabouts. The more the better and if you can have a piece of art in the middle, even better. So after 5 roundabouts and your luggage all over the place you arrive to the “Old” terminal. By the way renovated 1 year ago. So “Old” is not the word.

Get to the Train

The signalling from here to the train are pretty good actually. Clear and to the point. But now the fun starts!

The Train to bring Foreigners to Barcelona

You are Peter, just arrived from London and you don’t speak Spanish (not taking into account the “una cerveza por favor”). So there we go. You see this.

So where does this train go to? Which platform? How late? (Check out the only text: "To the platforms" No shit? Really?)

Sant Celoni?

You wait, and wait (no indication where and when it leaves) and then it comes. Great, you get in. Train reasonably new. And just to be sure you check on the screens inside where the train goes. Sant Celoni? Where the heck is Sant Celoni? I want to get to Barcelona! So why not check the stops on the route…

Where the heck is Sant Celoni? I want to go to Barcelona!

B.P Gracia?

You asked someone if this trains goes to Barcelona and after a positive answer you get in. Your hotel is in the centre next to Plaza Catalunya. The first stations appear: El Prat, Bellvitge. On the screen appear the next stations: Barna Sants and B.P. Gracia. You start to get worried, after those there is Clot Aarago. Doesn’t ring a bell either.

Abbreviate!!

So what is the case here? An over active employee of Renfe tried to abbreviate the names of the stations to a length that fits on the screens turning them into un-understandable stations names that nobody heard of. So how did this person get his idea through? Is there not such a thing as common sense or even better: Scrolling?

A Hint: Next time you get onto this train and you have no idea where to get off, try Barcelona Sants Station (Barna Sans) or Barcelona Passeig de Gracia (B.P Gracia)

No space not to stick to the really necessary

I must admit that designing for small surfaces has one very big benefit: constraints.

Designing for a normal screen gives you way more freedom, but it is too easy not to stick to that one thing that really is important.

Small screens on the other hand force you to stick to the core, those basics which are what makes it all work.

Design for small surfaces to the max

This week I came across the LG watch phone. Remember the 80’s with the calculator phone? Well, this one is kind of like that. So most probably will end up in the weird and wonderful cupboard, but what caught my eye was that there is only place for 2 buttons or a few lines of text.

So fed up of phones that do everything well, but to make a simple phone call you need 10 clicks?

Well, here you go. More stuck to the basics you won’t get it.

Create a mobile App. Even if it doesn’t make sense

Feature creep. Sounds familiar that it is difficult to avoid more and more features creeping in? Most probably it won’t be difficult to convince people that you need a mobile app. (maybe it actually doesn’t make any sense, but the exercise could be sufficiently useful just to go through the design process)

Start selecting what really is important in your products. Strip it down to the bare basics. Put it in a design and even if you are not going to develop the mobile app, keep it, print it out and make everybody see it. I promiss you, having consensus on what is really important is a massive step…

Try it and let me know if it gave any results!

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(image thanks to CNET)

Self Checkout, what a fun if it just would be a SELF Checkout

Sometimes there is no way out, saturday, IKEA Hell.

After nearly kicking 2 lovely jovely couples that seem to have a romantic moment on a saturday afternoon in IKEA (for God’s sake, how is that possible?) and being distracted by stuff I really don’t want but my wife yes, we arrived at THE QUEUES.

THE QUEUES

And if I say queues, I mean mega queues. As a bit of a gadget freak I wanted to try their self checkouts. In the supermarkets they work OK if you don’t have a granny in front of you that is scared by every sound. (Got the hint UX designers….)

I must say that they are not too bad, rather cool actually. You can do a lot, cancel and have most of the options you have when interacting with a human being.

The Human Being

But there comes the problem! The Human Being. In this case an assistent that was there to help you and man, she screwed up big time. I tried to tell her in a friendly way that I knew how to do it, but I guess she wanted to show off her knowledge of the system and there we went.

So how did we end up? Having to queue again after having to endure a long queue of people staring and sighting while we were waiting for the assistent to make a mess.

Conclusion

Not too bad these self checkout. As long as they would be SELF Checkout!

PS. Saw that I am not the only one. Read the article at the BBC

Cloud based Business Analytics from Gooddata

SaaS and the Cloud are great. You have all your data available easily and from wherever.

If you are doing a good job and have great API’s to extract from and enter data into your application you open the true gates of heaven.

Being a fan of Tim Berner Lee’s call for action: RAW DATA NOW! it creates loads of possibilities that you most probably didn’t think about.

One we did think about though is the possibility to have good analytics and business intelligence.

Business Intelligence: A market with little innovation

Looking at the big guys like Cognos, SAP and IBM there is not a massive amount of innovation going on in this market. Huge monsters of thousands of features (you must do something to defend your price) usability and ease of use is placed as a priority after the feature shopping list.

So how come that this hasn’t changed?

Until now the data to base the analytics on is local on your network, in your software or on one database. So you need something local to harvest all this data and as standards are lacking something that can read loads of different data.

The Dashboard: Nothing more needed

Go and check with your CVFO and CEO and see what data they are really looking at. Observe… Do they go into all little details, create reports, interlink tables? I bet you they don’t. Most probably they have 1 dashboard with all they need. And if they need more, what happens? Yep, they ask the assistant or admin person to create them a report.

So why all the fuzz if only 1 dashboard per person is needed? Most probably you need a lot of data to create this simple dashboard. Data from your sales team, web analytics, online marketing and financial team. For fun just draw your ideal Business Intelligence dashboard and then go into details on what you need to create these graphs, bart charts and indicators.

Data in The Cloud: Mash you Way Up To The Gates of Heaven

With Google Analytics as a good trend setter for analytics with a user interface that doesn’t require a big fat manual (is there a one actually?) more are to follow. One recent great product I spotted is Good Data that is easy to use and has the possibility to mash up data from different sources. Tim Berners Lee must love this!

Oh yeah, and it is in the Cloud obviously, so light, no setup, not being stuck in a data format.

> Visit the Gooddata website