codehesive.com | experience & information design

The Webby Awards and what Government sites really need to be?

May 12th, 2013

Earlier this year, the new UK Government portal GOV.UK won “Design of the Year” from the Design Museum. But this wasn’t just in the web or digital category — it was THE design of the year. The site was valued higher than the architecture and construction of The Shard and even the Olympic Cauldron from London 2012. An amazing precedent for digital work that rightly illustrates what a tremendous and ground-breaking project GOV.UK is and continues to be.

gov.uk

Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, sums up GOV.UK nicely:

all the things that we would like to take for granted from the Government but, in a sea of red tape and jargon, usually can’t

When the 2013 Webby Awards were announced at the end of April, I made a casual assumption that GOV.UK would make the list of awards. However, it didn’t. But what I find interesting is perhaps not so much GOV.UK’s omission, but more what the actual winner of the 2013 Webby Awards for Government website was.

Hold on folks, strap your bullet-proof vest on and cock your pistol: this shit is about to GET REAL. Ladies and gentlemen, take cover as you visit MILWAUKEE POLICE NEWS.COM. (If you’ve got motion sickness pills, take them now: the parallax is like a stormy sea).

Wow. They say the Webbys are “The Oscars” of the web — and in this case Michael Bay and Vin Diesel have just won. The site is missing one thing: Bad Boys by Inner Circle playing in the background. The site is seriously like an episode of cops… but in some strange futuristic world or perhaps a different dimension.

I’ve not been to Milwaukee, but I was always under the impression it was a quite nice place. However, after visiting this site I’m concerned that Milwaukee is a cross between Gotham City in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and a city in some Latin American narco-state. (The most wanted section is particularly indicative of this).

I’ve actually got no idea who this site is for. I can’t even see any way to contact Milwaukee Police on this site. There’s not even a single mention of 911 on the page. There is a link to how you can pay parking tickets, but it’s about 10,000 pixels down the page just above the sexy photo of a SWAT van.

So, GOV.UK clearly has a lot to learn from MILWAUKEE POLICE NEWS.COM and their Webby triumph. As a proud British resident (and almost citizen), I’ve decided to help out the nice folks at GOV.UK and redesign their homepage to make it more better and stuff.

Check it out: the new and improved GOV.UK.

Posted in Web Design + Development, Web - General, Experience design, Information design, Interaction design, User Experience | No Comments »

Rethinking human verification: transforming the mundane and frustrating into playful and fun

April 20th, 2013

Sometimes it seems like the more technology we use to make our lives easier the more frustrations we are subjected to. Take for instance my own personal pet hate online: the awful CAPTCHA.

CAPTCHA

Reviled by all, CAPTCHA’s have become an accepted burden online. It feels like these unpleasant snippets of mangled text have become the first line defence in a war against machines and bots — based on the theory that humans are able to decipher these riddles better than machines. For now, at least.

CAPTCHA: Rise of the machines

Many alternatives to CAPTCHA have been proposed. Some of the best defence systems against bots are actually invisible to users — for instance the honeypot technique. The less human users are bothered the better, but there is another alternative approach that works remarkably well: so well, in fact, that it’s actually quite fun doing it.

When Facebook registers unusual activity on an account — for instance logging in from a new computer or overseas — it will often prompt the user to verify their identity.

One option it gives is identifying friends in photos.

Facebook

This approach well and truly turns user verification into a simple game: you get three photos of five friends you must identify (and two skips — which is useful in case it shows you the photos of some friend’s baby or dog or other randomly tagged photo).

The photos chosen are totally random and the process is quite fun. Not only does it make a serious issue like security verification a positive experience, the entire process is so great because the alternatives — such as CAPTCHAS — are so absolutely awful.

Facebook is different from say a ticket booking website in that is does have the luxury of having a huge amount of personal data to draw on. But surely with some creativity many websites could find a more creative way to filter out bots?

Let’s say, for instance, I’m trying to order some Black Sabbath tickets. Why not ask me to identify Black Sabbath from a group of images (or some music as an accessible alternative)?

Black Sabbath

Beats the hell out of a CAPTCHA — even though it might involve a bit of Justin Bieber.

Posted in Web Design + Development, Web - General, Experience design, Gamification, Interaction design | 1 Comment »

On GOV.UK’s “How designers work”

March 15th, 2013

Earlier this week, Peter J. Bogaards tweeted a link to a curious quote from the recently published GOV.UK guidance on what to look for when hiring a designer for a Government team:

LOL “Avoid CVs that emphasize the terms “UX” and “Creative”. Especially avoid “Creative Directors”. ~ gov.uk/service-manual…

— Peter J. Bogaards (@BogieZero) March 14, 2013

Looking at the specific guidance, most of it is very good:

How designers work
Designers and front-end developers should work together in one team, designing in-browser. This is a better way of working, avoiding silos and ensuring that decisions are made with complete awareness of the implications.

As a result, the people you hire should already have worked like this, or at least understand it.

When building a team ask to see examples of work and ask the designers to talk you through their contribution….

I totally agree with this. Designers and front-end developers working together in harmony is a wonderful thing and in turn enables us to create wonderful things.

But I’m not so sure about the next piece of advice:

Avoid CVs that emphasise the terms “ux” and “creative”. Especially avoid “creative directors”. These people are probably not a good fit for your team.

On a purely practical level, if you threw away every CV that had the word “ux” or “creative” on it you’d probably be left with a very small pile — if you had a pile at all. Being flippant for a second, imagine this structured as advice for a football coach:

Avoid CVs that emphasise the terms “striker” and “defender”. Especially avoid “captains”. These people are probably not a good fit for your team.

Looking firstly at creative: if a designer isn’t creative, what are they? Isn’t that the entire core of a designer? “Creative designer” seems like a tautology. Creative director is named as such as it describes a position of leadership, seniority and experience. If you’re looking for someone of mid or junior experience, then no, they probably won’t be a good fit.

If I’m not looking for the word creative in a CV, what words should I look for? Digital designer? Visual designer? Web designer?

Now looking at ux, this is where my feelings are slightly stronger. Why should I avoid “ux” designers? If you’re trying to build “user-centred products” then the designers who strive to build such things are often marketing themselves exactly as UX designers. There’s no definition of what UX is either on this page — nor any explanation of why they should be avoided.

Instead of UX designer should I be looking for interaction designers? Information architects? Web designers? Multimedia designers? Interactive designers?

I’m really curious as to why GOV.UK gave this particular advise. It doesn’t give any reasons why creative and ux designers should be avoided — nor what to look for instead. I was hoping to get some insight into this by looking at the Job description templates but unfortunately they’re hitting a 404 page at the moment.

I hope they can clarify this advice in the future — otherwise I think their advice is likely to confuse more than assist.

Posted in Web Design + Development, Experience design, Information architecture, Information design, Interaction design, User Experience | 2 Comments »

See Ticket’s Sneaky UI Dark Pattern

March 12th, 2013

Buying tickets can be a stressful business. Some gigs sell out in minutes, others never do — but you can never be sure, so being in front of your computer with credit card in hand when the tickets go on sale is the safest way to ensure you see the gig you want to see.

Last Friday Deep Purple tickets went on sale at The Roundhouse. Unsurprisngly, their website was in lock down mode due to massive traffic — both Deep Purple and David Byrne and Saint Vincent tickets went on sale at 9am that day. At position 350 in the queue, I wasn’t sure if I’d get tickets — and certainly not before 9:30am or so, and I was already running late for work.

Thankfully tickets were available on both Ticketmaster and Seetickets. I quickly compared prices between the two, and Seetickets was slightly cheaper — or so I thought.

On the payment page below, I believed I’d be paying £83.81. I usually check forms quite thoroughly before hitting “Buy”, but I was admittedly in a rush… so I got caught out by the sneaky trap below. Can you see it?

See tickets

This is the trap: I require Cancellation Protection for my tickets (additional cost £3.00) and I agree to the terms and conditions.

Not only is it pre-checked, the text at the end “terms and conditions” makes this at a casual glance look very much like a boring T&C checkbox. But no, it’s not: and by not unselecting this box, it added £3.00 extra to my bill.

The next page it confirmed this additional cost — after I’d entered my credit card details and been debited.

See tickets checkout

I can only see this as being a calculated ploy to trick users into buying ticket cancellation insurance. Consider the design below, which is what a more honest retailer would show:

See tickets redux

Now to be fair to See Tickets, they have refunded me on this, and their customer service is very good on Twitter — although their feedback form on the website wasn’t working when I tried to complain about this dupe.

@joffley We’ll refund it if you don’t want it, just DM us your order ref.

— See Tickets (@seetickets) March 8, 2013

I hope See Tickets rectify this design, as it is totally misleading and unfortunately a classic example of a Dark Pattern in UI.

Posted in Dark pattern, Experience design, Information architecture, Information design, Interaction design, User Experience | No Comments »

A little problem with following on Twitter

March 5th, 2013

Twitter has an excellent onboarding process that ensures you’ll be seeing tweets of interest within minutes of signing up. This is all part of Twitter’s consistently great user experience; however lately I’ve stumbled upon one exception to this:

You are unable to follow more people at this time.

Lately I hit the 2,000 mark of users followed on Twitter. This is indicative of what I was talking about above: Twitter is fantastic at encouraging you to follow more and more. The “Who to follow” pane is like an intellectual donut shop… juicy avatars of all sorts of users it believes you’ll be interested in.

And you just want to keep on eating. It’s a classic feedback loop: you click follow and you’ll get a new avatar appearing to tempt you again into following. It’s like a social network slot machine.

But therein lies the issue: depending on your level of followers, sooner or later you run out of coins.

Now Twitter has an interesting support article on following limits that explains how it works. It’s a tricky balance for them: trying to maintain their service, avoiding spam and abuse… there’s a lot of issues at play here.

For me the issue isn’t that they stop you following more than x followers, it’s more the lack of response the interface has to this limit.

It’s a pretty standard and simple convention in UI design that if a user can’t perform an action, either don’t show it or show that it is unavailable. Even though my Twitter follower list is now capped, Twitter still urges me to follow more. Yet if I click “follow” I’m thrown up the same old message: “You are unable to follow more people at this time. Learn more here.” Not great.

But here’s where this issue takes a turn for the worse. There are two ways to follow new people if you’ve hit your limit:

Unfollow users

Unfollowing users on a social network is a slippery slope. It’s hard to maintain a thick skin with this sometimes; anyone who’s used a service like Qwitter knows that it’s hard not to take these things personally when someone unfollows you. Was it something I said? Am I tweeting too much? Am I not as funny as I think I am? Am I tweeting many amusing cat videos? Or has that person hit their limit and is just “pruning” users?

And it’s often tit for tat: if someone unfollows you, it’s only human to want to unfollow them. And ironically, that means both users are followers down now, which sadly affects the number of users you’re allowed to follow: Twitter mentions ratios between following and followers, but doesn’t publish them.

Gain more followers

Telling users to get more followers is potentially negative as well.

“You’re not popular enough.”

Flash backs to highschool anyone?

A more elegent solution

This could work a whole lot better, with a few simple changes.

One option would be to remove the whole “who to follow” pane altogether. But surely there’s a better solution than that.

Messaging

Let’s say you’re ten users away from your Twitter limit. Why not communicate that to the user?

Positive actions

And if you’ve hit your limit? Why not encourage the user to try and gain more followers?

This way the drive to continually interact and engage with Twitter remains while removing frustrating and potentially negative experience.

Posted in Web Design + Development, Experience design, Information architecture, Information design, Interaction design, Social media, Twitter, User Experience | No Comments »

Your year in review on social networks: Twitter vs Facebook

January 6th, 2013

On December 12th I noticed a link on Facebook: “2012: Your year in review”. Boldy it proclaimed:

“A look at your 20 biggest moments from the year including life events, highlighted posts and your popular stories.”

I love these ‘end of year reviews’. They’re one of the best things about the close of the year — looking back over the year that was and reliving highlights (and often lowlights). Some of the more interesting ones from 2012 were Google’s Zeitgeist 2012, 2012 Year on Twitter and The Atlantic’s 2012: The Year in Photos.

Naturally I was really interested to see a personalised year in review from Facebook. Given that I use Facebook a lot — and therefore Facebook knows a lot about me, and has a lot of my data — my expectations were quite high.

Unfortunately, my Facebook year in review was woefully underwhelming. (If you’re friends me on Facebook, you can see my Year in review — or see your own — which is hopefully more interesting than mine).

So why was mine so underwhelming?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Web Design + Development, Data visualisation, Experience design, Facebook, Information architecture, Information design, Twitter | 1 Comment »

When more is actually less

September 28th, 2012

Lovefilm is a great service. I get plenty of value from it, and I easily watch hours of movies and TV shows on it each week both on my laptop and Playstation 3 (and possibly on mobile — if only they had a mobile streaming service)

Going back to TV specifically, I’ve been slowly making my way through countless hours of Lost on Lovefilm.

I’m in the final stretch now: only a few episodes left of the last season. But at the end of each episode, something happens that just drives me crazy. I see this come up on my screen:

The helpful ‘More like this’ screen suggests Justice with Nicholas Cage and a show called Spartacus: Gods of the Arena. Now I could easily question how relevant these suggestions are to Lost, but what really irks me is…

Why the hell isn’t there a link to the next episode of Lost?

In fact, there is no link anywhere on the entire page to the next episode. There are similar recommendation links on the page that link to random episodes I’ve already seen, but nowhere with a direct link to the next episode. Which would be the most relevant piece of content that could be suggested to me.

You can’t even hack the URL:
www.lovefilm.com/film/Lost-S06-E08-Recon/173294/
(…unless you know the name of the next episode and some mystical six digital ID)

Basically, I’ve got to hit the back button and remember what episode I just watched and click on the next episode under it.

Ultimately, watching TV series like this is infuriating. ‘More like this’ is actually ‘Less like this’.

Please Lovefilm, for Hurley’s sake — just add a link to the next episode in!

Posted in Web Design + Development, Web - General, Amazon, Experience design, Information architecture, Interaction design, TV, User Experience | No Comments »

Intelligent defaulting, responsive clarification

August 25th, 2012

Checking the weather on a gorgeous spring day in London (ostensibly to see how long the beautiful weather will last), and this is the experience documented from the BBC Mobile site:

After clicking weather, I was then prompted to search for my location. I entered London. I was then presented with 15 options for London — the first two in South Africa. BBC Weather is usually pretty good with geolocation, but for some reason on my mobile it can never work out where I am.

That’s not so bad; but seriously, if I enter ‘london’ into any site (let alone the BBC), surely London UK is a far more likely match than East London South Africa or London Canada?

What percentage of users would benefit from defaulting London to London UK (population 8,174,000) and making users from London Canada (population 366,151) and East London South Africa (population 135,560) then change to their London? An awful lot.

Google Maps does this very well: it contextually defaults to the closest geographic match and gives the option of ‘did you mean a different x?’

Intelligent defaulting, responsive clarification: it’s really not that hard.

Life would be so much easier if more sites did this properly; I look forward to the day when I don’t have to see insanely stupid screens like this (thank you journey planner):

Posted in Web Design + Development, Web - General, Experience design, Google, Information architecture, Interaction design, Travel, User Experience | No Comments »

codehesive.com | experience & information design

The Webby Awards and what Government sites really need to be?

Rethinking human verification: transforming the mundane and frustrating into playful and fun

On GOV.UK’s “How designers work”

See Ticket’s Sneaky UI Dark Pattern

Your year in review on social networks: Twitter vs Facebook

When more is actually less

Intelligent defaulting, responsive clarification

Experience design

Information design

Technology

On Twitter?

Links

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