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I am very pro usability—anyone who knows me will agree. I fight the fights that need to be fought. I go against the corporate decisions that don’t benefit the user. I evangelize for Donald Norman and hang on  every word that Jakob Nielsen speaks. This is why it seems so very strange that I would be incited by an innocuously titled article, Stop Password Masking, on useit.com.

Dr. Nielsen contends that we—Web developers—should abandon legacy design and stop providing “little dots” instead of the actual characters that a person is typing in for their password. On the surface, this seems to make sense. After all, it’s hard to type in that which you can not see.

I guess I should be upfront and say this is many years as a sys-admin speaking–not a usability expert—but none-the-less I found many things flawed with the post. I would add that the designers of systems have a responsibility to protect users from compromising their account.

But the main point of the article is that by not showing users what they are typing when the type a password, we are decreasing the usability of the page and also the security of the page.

Here is a brief recap of the main points of the article (please read the whole article for yourself):

1. There are very few times when a user is in actual danger of someone “seeing” what they are typing
2. Users make more errors when they can’t see what they are typing
3. More errors means less confidence
4. All this leads to users using simple passwords or copy/pasting passwords

One of his primary points is that a “skilled criminal” can capture you password by looking at the keyboard, not the screen. It’s hard for me to argue with this as I have witnessed this and even done it.

Here’s the rub…I have managed users on systems large and small for the better part of 20 years. I have learned by observation that people don’t have simple passwords because passwords are hard to type in without seeing, they have simple passwords because they are easy to remember.

As a system administrator I know, inherently, that the weakest chain in any system is the user. And it’s not because it’s hard for them to type their password, it’s because they want one password that is easy to remember and is somehow tied in with who they are as an individual.

For this reason, I find passphrases to be a better solution because they are easy to remember and are instantly harder to hack due to their length. If someone has a hint of what you like, they may more easily crack the passphrase with shoulder surfing, but it’s much harder than a simple password.

Lastly, Dr.  Nielsen points out that we should abandon legacy design—I am a HUGE fan of abandoning legacy design when it makes sense. Dr. Nielsen points to both form reset buttons and password masking as being legacy design…as the twitteratie say, EPIC FAIL!

Let’s focus on usability, but only when usability is really the problem. But maybe you disagree with me, leave me a comment.

Excuse the headline. To be clear, I do think that usability tests are very valuable. But often times they provide little data beyond what you are testing—for instance, the labeling of the primary navigation. Yes, seasoned testers can often times extrapolate large amounts of observational data, but sometimes the really niche features of a Web site aren’t so easily discovered. Users seldom provide ancillary ideas for features they may need. Instead the idea for a feature usually only occurs to a user when they needs it. So, when a feature pops up for me at exactly the time I need it, in exactly the place I need it, to me it means somebody really thought the problem through, perhaps even cared about me a little. To me it says: “hey, we want to make your life easier”.

All usability experts focus on the user first. That is, quite simply, what we sign up to do. As such, we often refrain from  ”feature-itis”—defined as adding features for the sake of having more functionality. Additional features often times do little more than round out a sell-sheet of product benefits, hardly ever benefiting the user. But there are many times when a well conceived feature can pay off not only for the user, but for the service provider as well. And I must correct myself, when discussing this blog post with a colleague of mine, Ernie Bello, he rightfully pointed out that it’s not the feature itself, but the execution of the feature that makes it usable or not.

As an example, I had purchased a couple songs from the iTunes Music Store by Canadian artist Sass Jordan. I know, I know, it’s 2009, but I just have this thing for Canadian rock from 2 decades ago. After listening to the two songs I had purchased (about 10 times), I decided to get a couple more. Of course, now I was regretting that I hadn’t purchased the whole album and saved a little money. That’s when I discovered this:

Example from the iTune Music Store

Note how when returning to the album from which I have already bought a couple songs, I am prompted to complete my album. It’s clear, obvious, and exactly where it should be. I am sure that many of you will point out that this is also a benefit for Apple, and that may be the case. But the point is, the very feature I wanted, existed when I needed it, and where I needed it—even thought I didn’t expect it to be there.

My point is that I doubt a usability test would have found the need for this feature. If I were a test subject with a task to buy a song, I would not have thought to tell a usability tester that it would be great to have a feature to complete an album, just in case I change my mind in the future. I didn’t even think about it as a feature until I actually needed it. But somebody thought about it for me, and thought about how I could use it. And yes, with that feature in place, it can be tested and can be validated.

What little features have you noticed or even created that have really made a big difference? Leave me your comments…

I must say up front that I don’t want to make a judgement on the new facebook homepage layout. I could, but I won’t. What is infinitely more interesting to me is everyone else’s opinion (hopefully that makes me a better usability designer!).

It is fascinating to me that there is such an uproar over the new facebook design. Some of the comments I hear–”it’s too cluttered”, “it’s to confusing”, “there is too much going on”–to be honest, are complaints I have always had.

Even more confusing, are comments such as: “I can’t see what people are doing any more”, “I don’t know anyone’s status updates unless I look at their pages”. It took me a long time to understand these last set of comments and I believe that it is people that have bookmarked their profile page as their homepage and are only seeing their own posts and not their friends.

So what does all this mean? Will facebook fail? Should/could this have been avoided?

I personally see a natural evolution in a widely used Web site that is responding to pressure from competition (e.g. Twitter). I don’t think this will be the downfall of facebook. But I do think this could have been avoided. How? Better promotion of the changes, a longer transition cycle, an initial opt-in period where they could have solicited feedback.

The key take-away is that they can listen to their community, even if it is a small minority of whom are complaining, and see if they can either meet them part way, or help educate them to the benefits of the change.

That’s what I think, what do you think?

After releasing the second version of Kindle hardware, Amazon had also release a software version of the Kindle reader for Apple’s iPhone. As cool as the Kindle is—and I have had the opportunity to use one, they are very cool—the $349 price has kept me from getting one.

Now, Amazon is making it clear that they are interested in selling books not hardware. Kindle for iPhone is a free download from the iTunes music store and is capable of reading any of the books available to the Kindle. The app works well, and the reading experience is comparable to other eBook readers available for the phone.

When reading a book or article, the user has control over choosing the font size (from 5 different sizes), bookmarking a page, and jumping to marked sections of the book. You navigate from page to page by swiping right-to-left (or left-to-right if you are going backwards) which I must admit felt like a natural gesture at first, but quickly grew tiresome as even a slow reader like me is constantly flipping pages due to the small screen size.

Books are added very easily via a Web browser. You simply navigate to Amazon, purchase the books you wish, and the next time you start Kindle for iPhone, your recent purchases are downloaded. My first book was Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. It downloaded in less than 5 seconds on WiFi. I also tried syncing over edge and that worked as well–with Treasure Island downloading in less than 20 seconds. In addition, Kindle for iPhone has Whispersync, which means, anywhere you leave off in you reading is automatically bookmarked and synced to any Kindle device. So, the claim is that moving between your iPhone and Kindle 2 will be seamless.

You can download books by ordering them on your iPhone, but the process is not a smooth experience. You click a Get Books link which takes you to a page describing how to get new books, but then links you off to Safari for you to purchase the books. You must then go back into Kindle for iPhone to download and read the new books.

Currently, my favorite eBook reader for the iPhone is Stanza. It is very similar to Kindle for iPhone, but I feel it does a couple things better. First, it allows you to move page to page by simply pressing once on the right or left side of the screen. Second, it allows you to download tens of thousands of free books directly from Project Gutenberg very quickly and easily. Third, and this is mostly superfluous, Stanza adjusts it’s screen when you turn the phone sideways. In reader mode it will give you a wider column. In title browsing mode, you see your library using Cover Flow.

But, the really great thing about the Kindle for iPhone software is that all these books I purchase will just work if I do buy a Kindle. All these books will automatically be available on my newly purchased Kindle. Also, the selection of books is very competitive in price and fairly substantial.

If you are interested in trying out the software, here is a list of free and low cost books I found that sounded interesting.
Free:

• The World’s Greatest Books Volume 01 Fiction
• The World’s Greatest Books Volume 02 Fiction
• The Three Musketeers
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
• South: the story of Shackleton’s 1914-1917 expedition
• The Island of Doctor Moreau
• Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Frankenstein

Less than $1.00:

• The Man Shakespeare (And His Tragic Life Story)
• The Memoirs of Victor Hugo
• The Prince (Machiavelli)
• Remarks of President Obama at the Signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
• The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

What are your thoughts? Leave me a comment….

Skittles unveiled their new corporate site to much applause and some disdain by the Twitter community. Taking a cue perhaps, from agency.com, they have reduced their site to be nothing but a navigational overlay box on top of content provided by social network sites.

screen grab: skittles.com homepage on March 2, 2009

This works by making their:

• home page a Twitter search feed
• product pages, Wikipedia pages
• media pages both Flickr and YouTube feeds
• friends page a FaceBook page

Simple is best right? Maybe not.

So what is the upside for Sktittles? Well today, at least, they have generated plenty of free publicity. Going forward, they will have a lot of fresh content and perhaps some ongoing publicity.

But how about the downside? There are plenty of thoughts that pop into my head.

Perception

How will they be perceived by the social networking community or the social network sites themselves? Within several hours of launching their Flickr page was account “missing” and a “neutrality” warning was posted at the top of their Wikipedia article.

screen grab: the article notice that appears at the top of Wikipedia's Skittles page.

Skittles is “borrowing” a lot of bandwidth from these sites, for free, and what are they providing in return? Users of social network sites provide content, sometimes very interesting content, and that, along with increasing per-page impressions is the fee they pay for using a free service. What is Skittles giving back to the community?

“Social-ness”

The biggest part of being a part of “the social”, and the part that companies often don’t get, is that it’s about 2-way communication. Kudos (excuse the pun), to Skittles for allowing their customers to have an unfiltered voice, but where are they in the conversation? We want to hear Skittles interact with their customers, not just hear ourselves talk about them.

Alienation

What is the experience for many of Skittle’s potential customers? For instance, you now have to be 13 years old to view the site. And even if excluding kids from a candy store makes sense, what about the folks that are Web savvy, but not social network savvy. Perhaps this site will be a little weird to them. Which leads me to the biggest issue, usability.

Usability

Is the site usable? We all know that when considering usability, we must first consider our audience. Some would even go as far as saying that we can limit to a specific target audience, not just any possible site visitor. If we suppose what a target audience for Skittles might be, and even if that audience is entirely composed of social network aware individuals, would they find the site useable?

Well, next we would need to know the tasks the audience might engage in. Let’s also suppose it’s the following:

• find nutritional information – OK, it’s available via Wikipedia, but can I be sure it hasn’t been altered? I also need to do quite a bit of searching (e.g. reading and scrolling) to find it.
• find contact information – perhaps the easiest thing to do on the site and bonus points for not hiding the phone number
• search for information – not available at all. This is a complete failure for many web users who wish to visit a site and immediately search for the piece of information that they need.

So, in 3 tasks that I picked, the site only covers one well. But in addition, I see some other major usability hurdles:

• Poor feedback as to where you are in the site. While this is important in any site, it is very important in a site such as this where the context of the page you navigate to may differ greatly from where you came. e.g. will the user know that WikiPedia is the product page?
• Navigational overlay gets in the way. On many pages the navigation box seems to be on top of the content and it’s not readily apparent how you shrink it.
• Random pop-up explaining how to “drop the box in the corner”. If you have to explain to your audience how to use your site, or worse, how to navigate away from it, you have failed at usability.

screen grab: skittles.com pop-up explaining how to navigate away from their site.

Lastly, while not a usability issue, it is odd that a promotional site would ask you to accept their terms and conditions before they tell you about their product. Given the nature of the content that may appear, I certainly understand the reason, but it seems like a big hoop for someone to jump through just to view your site.

To sum it up, I would say the new Skittles.com makes a great meme and a is perhaps a bit of Internet history, but to me, the site doesn’t make sense. While I think that companies should be involved in social networking, it’s very important how they approach it.

I can’t wait to see what my colleagues at BrandLogic think about the impact this site has on the Skittles brand. And I would love to hear what you think. Please leave me your comments.

The kind folks at 80 works for designers take us behind the scenes to a class that is creating a prototype interface for deaf people to feel music.  It’s a wonderful read just to review the processes that the class uses to work through the problem domain. But more so, it is a great reminder that usability should include accessibility. Thoughts?

Closed Loop Marketing posts a very well thought out article regarding the page a Web site presents when a user logs out.

Sandra Niehaus writes:

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a site visitor for a moment. … Now she’s done using the site, and logs out.

And sees, however briefly, the logout thank you page. Here is a transition state, a zone where the visitor’s attention is not yet focused on a new task. Here’s your opportunity. What will you say?

In addition to a critic of some excellent examples, Ms. Niehaus also creates a nice table of optimization guidelines. Definitely a good read.
I am also interested in reading the book she references:

In his post entitled: Yes, Twitter is still dangerous (http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=1703&tag=nl.e539 , viewed 2/17/2009), Michael Krigsman contends that Twitter poses a security risk to businesses and governments. The example Mr. Krigsman uses is of Congressman Hoekstra real-time twittering his travels within Iraq. This, of course, does much to undermine the secrecy of the convoy. 

Is this an issue with Twitter? Could the same not be said about any other real-time/near real-time communications platform (e.g. e-mail, IM, cell phones, blogs, etc…)? Couldn’t the Congressman just as inadvertently mentioned his travel plans to a television or print reporter? Or just plain sent a postcard?

We can’t ignore the speed and reach with which the Internet can spread a message, and also we can’t ignore the intractability of that message. Mr. Krigsman writes:

I’m personally aware of confidential meetings where participants innocently twittered sensitive information that thousands of recipients may have read. 

Have you ever Reply-all’ed to an e-mail instead of just Reply? It’s just so easy to do irreparable damage.

Still, our communications paradigms continue to shift, and we with them. It is not over generalizing to say all forms of communication can create a security risk. So, yes Mr. Krigsman is correct in saying that Twitter is a security risk. But it has always been about whether the benefits outweigh the risks. Which brings me back to Twitter, government and business. 

Yes, secrets can leave their protected environment and travel around the world, and yes, sometimes that is very, very bad. But, conversely, you can also engage in a meaningful dialog with your constituents/customers. If we focus just on government for a moment, the potential is very exciting.

Government 2.0 promises to bring the two essential things that any democracy needs: transparency and two-way dialogue. For the record, transparency does not mean that we post our missile codes or troop movements on MySpace (that is soooo 2 years ago). It means we have more insight into the legislation that affect our future, and more importantly that we have a efficient way to discuss them with our elected officials.

It is important that elected officials such as Representative Hoekstra continue to use communication platforms like Twitter, to keep in touch—and of course equally important, that they are properly trained on how to safely and efficiently use them. They should also take the time to see the other side of the conversation, and perhaps they find it equally valuable. 

Businesses are slowly beginning to see the value in listenting to all the (free) feedback their customers are providing. Likewise, they are also starting to join in on the conversation. While everything may not always be as controllable as corporations would prefer, being a part of the conversation ensures your point of view is heard.

I think platforms like Twitter are a great benefit for government and business, and I for one would like to say to both: “Welcome!  We created you and we know you will make mistakes, but that’s OK, we are here to help”.

We all know that the Apple brand is ease-of-use. But, usability expert Jakob Nielsen contends that this may very well be why Apple has survived all these years:

During its first decade, the Mac offered clearly superior usability compared to competing personal computer platforms…

The Mac’s miserable marketplace performance seems to pose a strong argument against usability. Why bother, if it doesn’t sell?

The counter-argument is that usability is the only reason Mac survived. Compared to the PC, it was much more expensive, had only a fraction of the specialized applications, and was cursed by Apple’s business-hostile attitude.

So why would anyone pay more for less? Because Macs were easier to use.

It’s an inspirational article for usability, with links to many other interesting articles.

The Digital Experience Group of the New York Public Libraries (NYPL) decided to try a bold experiment. Knowing that they wanted as much user feedback as possible and that they had willing participants—namely their web users, the Group created a trouble free survey tool to gather data. You may be saying, “Ohhhh, online surveys! What’s so bold about that?”. As usual, it’s the chosen implementation that helps to make the difference.

The Digital Experience Group created Infomaki, a system that provides a simple, one question survey asking a subject something as easy as “What would you click on to find events?”. After the subject answers that question, they are thanked, and simply asked if they would like to answer another question. Here’s what is so great about this approach: it’s very mindful of the subject’s time and very non-intrusive. The concept is that this will lead to more people willingly being repeat subjects. Also, more random questions will be answered. With a traditional survey, you may tend to get the same questions answered at the start of a survey, but have people drop out, thus not getting sufficient answers to the end questions.

There are a few bugs in the system, but it appears the team is actively working on fixing them. I gave it a try, and quickly got hooked. While obviously, my subjective opinion and observations do not constitute a usability test, I have observed most test subjects glad to answer a single question. But conversely, I have seen that grimace or shoulder slump when a subject can sense you are settling in for a multi-part questionnaire. My experience would point to Infomaki being a well received data collection methodology.

But don’t take my word for it, look at the results of the 48 hour pilot:

[a prior] survey received 7,341 individual answers to questions from 520 respondents, 60% of whom completed the whole survey. This totaled 7,341 individual answers over 14 days. Infomaki, on the other hand, garnered over 6,900 answers from 840 respondents in its initial 48-hour maiden voyage.

Seems like the concept works, but the real measure of success will be the continued interest of the subjects and the quality of data. Let’s hope we here more about how Infomaki works out.