Centralis Blog

This morning, NPR reported on the United States’ Centers for Disease Control (CDC)’s difficulties with helping people understand how to care for family members who are sick with H1N1 flu, while also protecting themselves from illness.  The NPR story chronicled the efforts of a mother in Portland, ME who visited the CDC’s website to learn more about treatment and precautions.  Her experience is sadly typical of what users often encounter online – messages that do not understand or appreciate the recipient’s perspective run the risk of communicating nothing.

I love the rush of creativity we see in website design. Having been fortunate enough to work with some excellent designers over the years, I appreciate a fresh, innovative visual design as much as the next person. But I often wish design teams would invest less energy in coming up with creative or "compelling" website navigation systems. You know the ones: menus that move around the screen playing hide and seek, or are scattered across the page, or refuse to reveal themselves until we discover them, or that just don’t look like anything we’ve seen before. Certainly navigation has a role to play in expressing a brand, but it has a more fundamental role -- to help people get where they’re going.  

Recently we have worked on projects where the website security functionality was shown to significantly impact the usability of the website.  During these initiatives, we gathered some helpful guidelines on how to design usable website login functionality.

Being a successful usability test session moderator requires more than just watching a participant use an interface.  It requires complete focus, finesse and flexibility.

One of the interesting presentations at the 2009 Usability Professionals’ Association Conference was “Secrets of Simplicity ” presented by Giles Colborne.  During this presentation, Giles posited that a key component of usability is simplicity and presented guidelines for creating simple designs.  At Centralis, we believe guidelines are great as a starting point when creating a design, but ultimately it’s the user who determines if a device is simple to use.

Hillcrest Labs may just change the way we watch TV.  As cable and satellite providers redefine television by increasing programming choices and integrating with home networks and the Internet, users are left to shoe-horn these new offerings into their old concepts of how TV works.  Hillcrest Labs’ Loop Pointer and interactive navigation system break the TV mold altogether and establish a new schema for interacting with in-home entertainment.  Driven by user research and grounded in user needs, Hillcrest’s design dovetails with Centralis’ experience with designing for TV – it’s critical to provide a clear, fun experience for driving engagement and promoting acceptance of new offerings.zwmf2v7qyt

During a usability test, most people are focused on the main event — what’s happening in the testing room.  Everyone watches the moderator and the participant, eager to see how the product or website performs.  While most usability practitioners are taught to manage what happens in the testing room, what if you’re in charge of managing the room full of people watching the sessions?

Those of us charged with creating useful, usable products come from many academic traditions, work in multiple settings and offer a wide variety of technical skills.  Despite these differences, our recent discussions with colleagues at the Usability Professionals Association annual conference suggest that effective usability professionals share skills, experience and personality characteristics that transcend the diversity of our backgrounds.  The best usability professionals offer well-developed skills honed by experience, and attack their challenges with tenacity, pragmatism, empathy and a sense of humor.

In Don Norman’s recent article on sociable design, he states that “No object is an island, entire of itself”, however “each piece is designed as if it were an island, independent of actual usage.” The design of how products work together, otherwise known as compatibility, is a prime example of this disconnect. Often how a device works with other objects in a users’ environment is neglected during product design.

When a design is giving users difficulty in a usability test, a common response of the observers is to dismiss the participants as non-representative:

Originally developed to obtain group opinions on product messaging or communications, focus groups are now often used to elicit feedback on interactive applications such as software or websites. In a typical focus group, a moderator demonstrates a concept and then solicits feedback from participants. However, this traditional format does not work well when evaluating complex interactive products. Focus group participants must use a product in depth before they can judge its effectiveness, voice their information needs or explain what features they want and why.

On a recent blog post, we were thrilled to see that the first question you should ask when hiring a web design firm is, “What is your approach to usability?” Naturally, we think the best answer is, “We partner with a user experience firm.”