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ActNow Launches (2.0 for good not evil)

Isn’t that a great mission for a 2.0 site? Yes? Well, don’t just sit there. Act Now! Tell your friends, tell your friends’ kids, write about it on your blog. Get busy. Please

ActNow is not your average old website - it’s really quite 2.0. You’ll find many of the 2.0 buzzwords in action on the site including User Generated Content (come up with a better buzzword and I’ll use it), RSS, Social Networks and more. It’s based on a Wiki format, where members can create their own pages using a range of different templates, and create or upload content - written word, photos, video, Flash movies, you name it.

Members can go back and edit their content whenever they like. They can also give permission to other members to edit the content. So, if you’re putting a page together about Obesity, and there are a group of you doing research on the issue, you can all contribute to the content that goes on the page.

As you can imagine, this was the topic of *much* angst. Letting anyone put whatever content they like on the website. It’s a scary thing to do. As you can imagine, the lawyers were terrified. But, trust is a 2.0 thing too. We needed to have faith in the community that would build on ActNow and trust that people will use the powers given to them for good and not evil.

Throughout the project we had a little mantra that I borrowed from Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path.

”The Web’s lesson is that we have to let go, to exert as little control as necessary. What are the fewest necessary rules that we can provide to shape the experience? Where do people, tools, and content come together? How do we let go in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to our business?”

Time will tell if this risk pays off. Of course, it will be a pretty quick task to get rid of these freedoms and to build in a more onerous moderation path… but who wants that? Certainly Inspire don’t need the extra work, and it takes away that ‘magic’ of the internet, which is that you press a button and it’s suddenly there for the world to see.

Moderation is boring. So, we’ve taken the approach of distributing moderation - on all of the content pages is the option to ‘report’ content - meaning that the ‘official’ moderators only need to look at a few pages (hopefully) rather than check off every single thing that goes on the site.

I’m fascinated to see how this plays out.

That beautiful homepage is pretty cool too. It looks like a tag cloud, but it’s actually not. (In fact, no tags were used in the making of this site… so, perhaps it’s not really 2.0 afterall - don’t you worry, they *were* discussed at length but we opted out).

So, those things that look like tags are actually the names of the various issues that people are writing about on the site. The ones that are being viewed the most are shown in the cloud on the homepage, with the most often viewed shown in the largest font size and less often viewed in gradually smaller font sizes. Cool huh.

(Don’t you love it when XML and Flash play so nicely together?! Cheers to Damian and Dom for their technical brilliance and many hours of hard work)

What we’ll get to see over time is what issues are most important or interesting to young people. Also, when something big is happening in the news we’re expecting that this will probably be reflected on the homepage cloud, making it really easy for people to get straight to the content they’re interested in.

It also allows you to get a quick preview of all the top issues from the homepage, thanks to the little preview box.

Lots of crazy stuff, hey? Will the young people be able to use it? We can confidently say yes. You see, this site has been designed in concert with the people who use it, and they’ve been testing it and testing it for months now. Lots of them!
The project has already involved more than 100 young people, participating in ‘incubators’, as interns, helping to develop content and start build the online community.

Working on a project with the Inspire Foundation is a real exercise in participatory design.

The young people have a really active involvement in deciding how the website would work. They used online forums and face to face meetings to discuss everything from what kinds of content the site would need, to how to best group this content so that people could find it.

They not only *read* the specs, they pored over the wireframes and held workshops. Never before have I walked into my client’s office and found my wireframes stuck up on the wall like this! (Obviously I was so excited I had to capture the moment!)

At every step, the young people were involved in decision making, and were our go-to point when we needed to decide if an idea was going to fly or not. So, even though they didn’t necessarily know what a wiki was, or what and RSS feed was - they took the ideas we suggested and evaluated them and they decided whether it was in or out and how they wanted it to work.

It’s a great way to work, and particularly good when you’ve got such a tough target audience. I don’t think I’d ever want to work on a youth focussed site again without having access to a bunch of people in the target audience to guide what I was doing and to act as a sounding board for my ideas and approaches.

It should be like this for *all* projects… but, in reality, it rarely is. (Unless you’re working exclusively on Intranets, in which case you have no excuse!).

But anyway - ActNow. Launched. Hoorah!

Now what it needs is a vibrant community - which I’m sure it will get if enough young people know about it. So, pass it on.

(Either that or make a cash donation to Inspire )

Thank you!

Technorati Tags: ActNow, Web2.0, Activism, SocialNetworking

UnFundaMental: Left, Right, Top, Bottom? Consider the context for navigation

‘A key motivation for this design decision was that a right-hand navigation better reflects core values of the Audi brand: innovation, progressiveness, and individuality. The design goals (creating a usable but unconventional layout) were therefore tied closely with the business goals (reinforcing brand values and distinguishing the site from competitors’ sites).’

Interestingly, Nielsen (1999) also theorizes that right-justified navigation areas should result in better user tasking and usability. He believes that placing the navigation menu next to the scrollbar will save users time. Additionally, he claims that a right-hand navigation and the main content area on the left should increase the priority of content. Nielsen abandons this logic, however, and goes on to dictate the use of a left-hand navigation: “If we were starting from scratch, we might improve the usability of a site by 1% or so by having a navigation rail on the right rather than on the left. But deviating from the standard would almost certainly impose a much bigger cost in terms of confusion and reduced ability to navigate smoothly” (Nielsen 1999). In other words, the vestigial behavior outweighs the actual efficiency of a right-hand navigation. Nielsen offers no proof of reduced usability with a right-hand navigation, however.

Fitts’ Law: Fitts’ law has been frequently applied to computer interface design (Mackenzie 1992). For all intents and purposes, it simply means that the bigger and closer an item is, the easier it is to click. Position on the screen, then, is a key factor in “ease of click”. In general, shorter mouse movements are better according to Fitts’ law. Therefore, locating the main navigation menu next to the scrollbar on the right side of a Web page should indeed reduce the time required to alternate between the two.

Constantine & Lockwood (2002): You can confidently make novel use of many standard, well-established controls, visual elements and interaction idioms provided that new functions and behaviors are consistent and logical extensions of the old…Significant improvements in the user experience often require creative departures from standards and accepted practice. However, useful innovation in visual and interaction design should not burden the new user with a long and frustrating learning process”

• Audi
• Macromedia/Adobe
• Sun

• Anyone out there disagree and think that RHS navigation is the devil’s spawn?
• Anyone got some other good example sites or literature to back up RHS (or maybe bottom?!) navigation systems?
• Anyone got another FundaMental Belief that needs tearing apart?

User Experience & Cognitive Pleasures (there’s easy, and then there’s *experience*)

User experience and usability are two different things. And usability does not always imply a system or interface that does not require any learning, or any enquiry, or any challenge on the part of the user.

I constantly find myself trying to walk a balance between using ‘convention’ where it is most appropriate, but also looking for ways that we can look to use new forms of interaction to solve user experience problems. I can’t understand how people who do IA and UxD can find their work fulfilling if they are constantly wheeling out the same old solutions to problems that they face on their projects.

I don’t understand how we expect our profession to develop, how we are going to create *better* user experiences if we are not always testing new approaches, giving new solutions the opportunity to prove that they are feasable, efficient, ergonomic and pleasurable, rather than ruling them out wholesale because there’s nothing in a textbook to say that the approach is ok.

‘ooh, that’s innovation for innovation’s sake’, I hear from these people who are overly besotted with convention. Well no. It’s innovation so that I can continue to do *better* work, and so I don’t become an automaton. ’show me the research that says your approach works’. Well, there is none.. yet. Let’s do some! ‘Tags, schmags. That’s fine for Flickr, but we’re not Flickr’. It’s difficult to argue with someone as obtuse and uninterested as that.

If you’re any good at your work and if you’ve been doing this UxD stuff for a while now, then you *can* almost do it in your sleep… if you’re content with taking an uninspired and boring approach to your work. Is that very respectful of your users?

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enjoying analogue wireframing (pencil rules, ok?)

So, I’ve been doing a whole bunch of wireframing lately.

I have to admit that, in the last little while, I’d gotten into the habit of wireframing straight into Visio, maybe after a quick thumbnail sketch on a notepad somewhere.

The site I’m working on at the moment has quite a bit of application type functionality in it, as well as a whole bunch of content, and offers the opportunity to be a little bit creative with the interaction design.

Out of habit, I pretty much launched straight into Visio (after a couple of quick sketches), but the further I got into it, the less satisfied I was with the output.

So, just for a while, I dumped Visio, got a whole pile of paper, some pencils and a sharpener, and just played around with ideas.

Ahhh. That’s just *soooo* much better.

It’s a little bit 37 Signals/Getting Real (although, these *will* end up as Visio wireframes in a functional specification - the size and dispersal of the team on this project demands that kind of documentation), but it does seem to be a popular approach to documenting RIAs. (Jeffry Veen was saying the other day that he’s going from pencil sketch to build these days).

So, what’s so good about pencil sketching your wireframes?

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Pattern Driven Usability (opportunities and challenges)

There’s been quite a bit of talk, on and off, around developing a library of patterns that interface designers could use that would mean that technology would become a whole lot more consistent and usable. So I was interested to discover that XPDesign, the methodology that PTG Global have been talking up for a while now, is essentially a part of this whole discussion.

PTG have been in the press a bit lately since they’ve launched their ‘certified usable‘ product.

The Certified Usable Guarantee: We guarantee that, on average, 90% of users can complete 90% of tasks with minimal assistance, within a reasonable time, without error, and with at least 80% satisfaction (based on a random sample of at least 300 end users using a Certified Usable™ technology product).

Craig Errey of PTG presented some of the fundamentals of XPDesign at the NSW CHISIG gathering last night. At the very least he should be congratulated for stimulating probably one of the most engaging debates around HCI methods that I’ve been a part of for quite a while.

The last one was probably back at OZCHI conference, where another PTG representative presented their work on the Citibank Mobile Banking interface and surprised many of us by stating that PTG didn’t need to iterate in their design process because they *knew* what worked and what didn’t. (Obviously, given that mobile banking is a pretty new application on a reasonably new device with many special complexities, many in the audience found this difficult to believe!)

Craig started his talk by asserting that ‘nothing particularly interesting has happened in HCI for the last 10-15yrs’. Big call. I guess that depends a lot on what you consider interesting, he then went on to challenge people to answer two questions: what is usability? and how do you make something usable?

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mobile: user interface design - the great frontier

I was reading a great post by Russell Beattie recently on handheld stylesheets and the great implementation that Opera have launched on their community portal recently. It took me back to my (not so distant) days finishing up my Masters degree with our digital project. As you may guess, my group did a mobile project.

It was a great little project and it really allowed those of us who’d been working in web for so many years to apply our skills to a different platform and develop some really interesting learnings. For me, I was pretty amazed by what we found with regards to Information Architecture and Interaction Design.

Being a university project, of course there was a lot more research involved than you’d usually have the budget of the time to do for a commercial build. This allowed time for me to definitively show that there were very, very few ID conventions when it comes to interface design for mobile web content.

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Googlecloud review (has anyone done usability testing on tag clouds yet?)

So, today I checked out Googlecloud which I saw via Ajaxian and which was released by the crew at Trade This. (phew! that’s my linking karma for the day!)

My first impression was not great. This was what I saw:

It got me thinking back to the Go Flock Yourself post in my daily links from yesterday regarding the evils (or really, the lack of usability) of tag clouds. I’m not concerned with purity of the representation in terms of font size, but in this case, the links that I’m actually interested in are going to be so small as to be virtually invisible… and I don’t even know if they’re there. This zeitgeist, who favour Britney Spears just over Linux Desktop, isn’t really much use to me.

But then…

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Discover Tasmania - content and interaction design case study

today I’m going to pick on the new-ish Discover Tasmania website

I came across this site in my quest to look at every single tourism site in the world (don’t ask… it wasn’t my idea). Its pretty new. I know this because when I started my quest the Tassie tourism site looked very different to how it does now.

The first thing I thought when I saw this site was - wow! Finally someone has made a sexy tourism website. Hoorah.

Then I started using it.

Oh, the disappointment when I discovered that they’d actually only designed, properly designed, a couple of the pages.
Actually… the problems started before then. First up, if you’re looking at the site using Firefox, chances are that you won’t even see the pretty Flash ‘intro site’ (its more than a splash page)*. I can only see if it I’m using Explorer (which I rarely do these days… mostly when sites won’t work properly in Firefox). Just say you do get to see the Flash-y bit, then you’ll quickly find some navigation elements that fly up from the bottom of the page. Tricky little buggers, aren’t they. Very hard to control. I wonder if anyone ever did any user testing on them? Couldn’t think so.

Find your way to the main site, and you’ll see a few surface pages that are quite pretty. Get down to the actual content and it all goes to hell. As usual, its the 3rd tier pages that Just don’t seem to have been designed. Why go to all the trouble of Flash homepages and then let it all go when it comes time to deliver on the promise?

See this page? Who designed that content? Oh, I know. The developer probably. Or, wait, someone chucking content into a CMS template. No one would deliberately design that content like that, would they?

How does this happen? In my experience, its one of three things (in reverse likelihood order):

a) whoever designed the site got bored with the detail stuff having started with designing the homepage and juzzy Flash stuff. (which reminds me of what I was thinking about the other day re: when to design the homepage)

b) whoever designed the site didn’t/couldn’t get hold of the content within a reasonable amount of time from when the site had to launch so as to allow them to design the content. (in which case we can blame project managers and/or clients, but also non-feisty designers)

c) whoever designed the site was given a ridiculously short amount of time to design the site and the only pages the client really cared about were the homepage and, if you’re lucky, the next level pages.

I know as well as anyone, that in most projects the circumstances are far from ideal, but the problems on this site are ones that I think are really symptomatic of a lack of user testing, a lack of interest in user experience, and a lack of interest in content. In this case, some really basic rules are broken - including my pet hate - sending me off to another site without giving me any indication that you’re going to do so. Argh, I hate that.

Its all a bit disappointing, because we should all really know better.

And yet, its still probably the second best tourism site I’ve come across.

Have you seen any better?

* Updated - actually, I’ve tested the site using Firefox on another PC and it seems to work fine… strange. I have Flash installed for Firefox on my laptop but, nada. No go with the Flash. But it seems that its not just a Firefox thing, so I take that back.