Senior Wired Magazine editor Robert Capps penned an article titled "The Good Enough Revolution" for Wired's September 2009 edition. The print edition included the daring (and perhaps intentionally provocative) subtitle "Why lo-fi tech will rule the world."

This rings of an absolutism, and such rings set off our antennae.

The best example, the Flip video, "nail(s) all three of those... traits." But not every product does. Take the computer market. Sure, netbooks sell like hotcakes while most of the rest of the market takes a beating. But there's a fly in the ointment: Apple.

Apple hasn't lowered its prices or jumped on the netbook bandwagon... yet (we'll keep our ears open for any announcements on that). Yet the company's fortunes continue to soar in the face of deplorable market conditions, which Capps asserts should make lo-fi tech spread faster.

New York Times columnist David Pogue gave a convincing talk on this subject, which he called "Simplicity Sells," and between rousing musical numbers he returned several times to the things Apple does right.

Pogue also mentioned a discussion he had with a "tap counter" while visiting a Palm facility in the 1990s. According to Pogue, this person counted taps for each feature that Palm put into its PDA. If a process took more than three taps, it had to be redesigned.

On this point, Pogue and Capps largely agree. Pogue, however, wisely sidesteps the land mines of "lo-fi," "price," and any other down-market connotation.

That's because "good enough" in technology means "accessible" and "easy to use." "Cheaper" is a nice bonus, but millions of people continue to prove that they will pay a higher initial cost to make sure that what they get is good enough. Capps stumbled only in neglecting this price-elasticity counter-argument.

Read his excellent article anyway (and check out David Pogue at TED) and get inspired. In any case, whatever you offer:

• Make it easy to use,
• Make it accessible,
• And above all, make sure it satisfies the needs of your clientele.

Do all of this, and higher prices might not bother potential customers as much as you fear.

Does this logic apply to your business? Let us know. We'd love to hear your opinion.

For now, Mozilla will start the program with a survey that aims to get a better understanding of who is joining the Test Pilot community. The first actual tests should arrive soon after this first survey is complete.

Mozilla stresses that it will take its users' privacy seriously. Participants have to opt-in and data will be stored in anonymous form. Only aggregate test data will be made available to the public.

Overall, this looks like a great project. Usability studies tend to be slow and costly, yet with Test Pilot, Mozilla will be able to quickly enlist feedback about new design ideas from its large community of users.

It's worth noting that WordPress isn't just any chunk of software: it played a formative role in the early days by giving millions of people a voice online. It's still one of the best examples of an open source ecosystem which has been made infinitely more rich for users by involvement of outside developers than the company could have created by itself. And it's a system used by some of the biggest publishing firms in the world at a time when the publishing industry is undergoing one of its biggest periods of change ever. CNN, Time, the New York Times and millions upon millions of bloggers are all using WordPress. Helping test the next version of this software is a pretty big deal.

WordPress interface and experience designer, Jane Wells, wrote about opening the testing process this morning and said that she's spent years responding to people who reference a nine year old article by usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen argued that usability tests only needed 5 participants in order to be effective:

"As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again. There is no real need to keep observing the same thing multiple times, and you will be very motivated to go back to the drawing board and redesign the site to eliminate the usability problems.

After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new."

Wells writes in response that, "While I've found that to be generally true, when your user base is as diverse in experience level, usage, platform configuration, language (right to left languages have a pretty different experience) and demography as the WordPress community is, 5 users really isn't enough to get a clear picture."

If you'd like to participate in this usability testing, professional usability test moderators are encouraged to contact Wells and eager guinea pigs are told to watch this space.

Plaxo and Google have collaborated on an OpenID method that may represent the solution to OpenID's biggest problems: it's too unknown, it's too complicated and it's too arduous. Today at the User Experience Summit, Plaxo announced that early tests of its new OpenID login system had a 92% success rate - unheard of in the industry. OpenID's usability problems appear closer than ever to being solved for good.

Plaxo, primarily known for the noxious flood of spam emails it delivered in its early days, is now an online user activity data stream aggregator owned by telecom giant Comcast. The Plaxo team has been at the forefront of the new Open Web paradigm best known for the OpenID protocol.

The Flow

The method Plaxo has been testing is called an OpenID/OAuth combo, in collaboration with Google. What does that mean, in regular terms? It means that Plaxo told users they could log in with their Gmail accounts as OpenID by clicking a link to open a Gmail window, then Google asked for permission to hand over user contact data using the OAuth standard protocol. Once login was confirmed, whether contact data access was granted to Plaxo or not, the Gmail window closed and users were returned to Plaxo all logged in. No new accounts, no disclosure of Gmail passwords to Plaxo, no risky account scraping and no need to import or find friends on the new service before immediate personalization could be offered.

This is a very different flow than most OpenID "relying parties" have followed before - but it won't be for long.

The Success Rate

Plaxo reported today that it has seen a staggering 92% of users who clicked on the "log-in with Gmail" button come back to Plaxo with permission to authenticate their identities via Gmail granted. Of those who returned, another 92% also granted permission for Plaxo to access their contacts list. Only 8% of the people who clicked to log in with a standards based 3rd party authentication ended up deciding to bail instead. That's the kind of ease-of-use that people presumed only Facebook Connect could provide.

When Plaxo engineers moved to turn off the short-term experiment, the business team said no way.

We expect to see this basic flow get iterated on even further. We hope it will ensure that every OpenID provider has some exposure and not just the big email providers, and we expect the pop-up action to be made increasingly unobtrusive.

This could be the day when OpenID became a far more realistic prospect than it has seemed before.

As Google also points out, scanning the search results page and deciding where to look at and what to click on seems to be an almost completely subconscious process.

Overall, users on Google's search page follow the familar F-shaped pattern that was also apparent in earlier eye-tracking studies .

What About Google's Ads?

Google's researchers don't mention advertising in this post at all. Neither the video, nor most of the images in the post include any advertising. Given how important these ads are for Google, we can only asume that Google regularly uses these studies to test how its users perceive the advertising on the search results pages.

Judging from the only images that show ads, most users only look at them after they have scanned through at least the first three or four search results.

Chances are that Google didn't want to give away too much of its secret sauce, though it would have been nice to see a bit more information about how users perceive and react to these ads.

How It Works

The "hybrid approach" - currently available in a limited beta - that Google and Plaxo have employed uses OpenID to sign in, then invokes OAuth for delegated authorization, and finally calls on the Google Contacts API to access information about contacts. And it does all of this transparently to the end user.

The first step in the Plaxo-Google scenario involves a new user being invited to Plaxo by a friend via Gmail. The invite understands the user is logged into the Google system and prompts the recipient with a "Sign up with my Google Account" button.

After clicking the button, the new user is directed to a Google Accounts page and asked to confirm their identity. The user is also given the option of allowing Plaxo to remember him or her in the future.

Accepting the sign-in request allows Plaxo to have access to the user's Google account credentials and the contacts associated with that account. The end result? The user now has a Plaxo account without all the rigamarole generally associated with a new account setup - and without a new username and password to track.

Why This Matters

While the concept of site-specific logins made sense in the early days of the Web, the idea of users being forced to develop a new identity, username, password, and profile on every site they visit - including adding all the same people as connections, over and over again - seems almost laughable today. It's definitely not scalable. Especially as password requirements become more and more stringent.

With the launch of Facebook Connect, the idea of a digital identity that could follow users from site to site moved from bleeding-edge tech people to a much larger contingent of the general populous. And the ease-of-use demonstrated by Facebook Connect put some friendly pressure on the OpenID contingent to improve the way they were managing the login process.

Plaxo's and Google's demonstration is something that could improve usability for all OpenID logins, reducing the series of handoffs that tend to frustrate and confuse users. But as Eric Eldon of VentureBeat notes, there is still more to be done:

"Multi-site sign on, like what the companies are announcing today, will be more compelling when it can bring integration down to one or zero clicks, but this is certainly a step in the right direction."

Who Wins? Everyone

This isn't a "winner takes all" pursuit or an "either/or" situation. We are participating in a Web environment where both Facebook Connect and OpenID can co-exist, because there are different applications that make both options viable and useful.

Personally, I'm not likely to use my Facebook account to access my bank and credit card accounts. But I am likely to use my Facebook credentials for social sites that would be enhanced by my existing Facebook connections. Similarly, my OpenID isn't always the right answer.

Facebook has momentum and a fervent user base. OpenID has a who's who of tech companies getting behind the concept as the preferred way to manage digital identities. Neither of these identity options are going away anytime soon.

What's best about the current situation is the rivalry between the two camps: one proprietary and easy-to-use, one open and more complex. It will be interesting to watch the two solutions push one another to become more and more simple for the end user. Because in that case, we all win.

Test Pilot is currently only a "still-in-concept platform," but the plan is to build a representative sample of Firefox users that will be recruited to evaluate new interface concepts and features.

How it Will Work

After the installation, the Test Pilot addon will gather non-personally-identifiable information from its users and then put these users into different demographic buckets. Depending on the tests that need to be run, users will be selected to participate in different experiments and will be asked to provide feedback on a regular basis. All the information gather through this plugin will be made available to the public.

This sounds like a great project, and we are happy to see that Mozilla is moving forward with this. It will probably still be a while before we see the fruits of this idea, however, as Mozilla is only now hiring a full-time developer to create the actual implementation of the Test Pilot program.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_test_pilot_usability_study.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_test_pilot_usability_study.php News Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:05:40 -0800 Frederic Lardinois When it comes to Web design and development, one thing trumps the latest technology and cool features: usability. Why? Because all of the features and functions in the world are completely worthless if a human user is unable to figure out how to use them. But testing against human factors, creating use cases, and observing focus groups can prove to be a costly endeavor for even the largest of companies.

Now, there's a cost-effective means of seeing how usable your pages are: Userfly, a simple way to test your site's usability for free - with one line of code.

The user behavior is recorded for the entire site visit, following the user from page to page. Once the user leaves the site, the capture ends.

Reviewing the walkthroughs is just as easy. Userfly provides information on the user's browser, each page visited, and time spent on each page. Clicking on a particular page plays back the interaction, showing where the user moved his or her mouse and where he or she clicked. Once you're finished watching, you're prompted to rate the usefulness of the capture. Then, you can decide to keep it or discard it.

Even during a short test, I found Userfly incredibly helpful - given that a number of users stopped by as I was testing the app. In fact, the only complaint I had was that the walkthrough fails to automatically pan as the user scrolls. Meaning? Meaning you have to manually scroll to keep up with the mouse movements - which I found to be nearly impossible on lengthy posts.

When the user didn't scroll, however, I found myself replaying the walkthroughs over and over. It was invaluable to see how other users see and use the pages that I find so familiar. Suffice it to say, I immediately noticed areas for improvement.

Userfly will allow you to record 10 users per hour, monitoring basic events for free. Those who are interested in more users per hour and more advanced events can contact Userfly for a quote.

How are people using your site? Wouldn't you like to know? Grab the code at Userfly and take a look at your site through someone else's eyes.

In general, I am just not good with physical things, because I am a software person. I've always been fascinated by people who can easily make sense of physical objects, because for me it takes a lot of effort even to put together children's toys. My brain is wired differently, to see patterns in software, not in hardware. But most people are the other way around.

A Brief History of Making Physical Things

Before we dive into the realm of software, let's look briefly at how we got here. Clearly, the history of humanity is the history of hardware. Since the Stone Age, when we invented the hammer, the world around us has been, so to speak, a nail. For the past several thousand years, we figured out how to use physics and chemistry to make physical objects. For a long time, we were craftsmen, until the industrial revolution brought scale and systematic manufacturing.

The main thing we learned is patterns in physical objects. We know that we can bend them under certain conditions. We know that there is friction. We know that things react differently to heat. The millions of facts that occupy our lives have to do with how we interact with the physical world and make physical things. These patterns get wired into our brains and help us live our daily lives.

Software 1.0: Why Computer-Phobia Happened to The Mainstream

Computers have software inside that does not behave like physical objects do. The key thing about software is that it is soft and that the conventional laws of physics do not apply to it. As a result, it's hard for people to picture what is going inside. It is hard for people with brains trained to deal with physical things to understand how software works. Because there are no physical laws we are used to, what are we to expect?

I constantly meet really smart non-technical people -- doctors, lawyers, teachers -- who have no clue how computers work. They treat them as magic black boxes that randomly break and never make sense. Why? Because software is a fundamentally different kind of system. It does not behave like the other things around us that we are used to.

On top of being different, software was really hard to use as recently as 5 years ago. PCs and Windows are to blame for the computer-phobia that still dominates the mainstream. My wife works for a large pharmaceutical company, and her Dell with its Windows 2000 is a monster. I do not blame her for being confused. In addition to being unbearably slow, the computer just makes no sense with its crazy administration scripts, incompatible drivers, annoying popups, endless choices, and daily crashes.

There is nothing in the physical world as complicated or confusing as her computer. All of the systems in our home work with the push of a button; all her daily routines are much simpler than figuring out how to turn off auto-spellcheck in Microsoft Word. Like most people, my wife is perplexed by the complexity of her work computer. But thankfully, things are turning around.

Software 2.0: Apple, Ajax, Video Games, and the New Laws of Physics

We changed our household computer to an Apple in 2004 and later on got one of the first iPhones when they came out. Obviously, my wife has no trouble using Apple products, because they are simple. More important, they, like physical things, behave as expected. Every user action results in a reaction that makes sense. There are way fewer choices, and things do not pop up out of nowhere.

Even better, this new kind of software proves to the user that the digital world can be superior to the physical one. There is no friction; things move around effortlessly; and they do work. This is not happening just with Apple products; it is happening all over the web. With the advent of AJAX, a new breed of web applications is teaching users that software can indeed work better than hardware. And that it can be way more fun.

It's the fun element that is likely going to be the tipping point, because it involves kids, our future. The latest video games are simply stunning. Like Apple software, they feature a lot of physical realism and behave as users expect. But in addition, they add a lot of special behavior only possible in the digital world. And it's not just about flying or instantly transporting from one place to another. Video games are creating a whole new reality that is an intricate blend of physical and digital.

Our kids are growing up native to this new digital world. To them, the new rules of digital physics are what the rules of physical physics are to us. They take these new rules for granted, because that is just how all our brains work.

Techies + Mainstream + Kids = Software Revolution

I never had trouble grasping software. To me, its inner workings and abstractions always made more sense than the physical things around me. But this is not so for many other people. Yet, the shift is on its way. Good software is becoming an integral part of our lives. Apple is one of the first and most visible examples of how software is taking over the hearts and minds of mainstream consumers. Its software is beautiful, simple, it works the way we expect it to, and people are starting to love it.

And this love is the first step to truly getting it, to understanding how something works. Because this new software is simple and fun, people are becoming attached to it and are willing to spend more time with it and, ultimately, to understand it well. This new software has a shot at making people get it, just like they get hardware.

And kids, of course, are already there. For them, all of this novelty is effortless and natural. It's a ton of fun, and they do not think twice about which buttons to press; they just know. So, with techies, the mainstream, and kids on board, we are poised to enter this brave new world dominated by software. The impact of this new world is going to be huge because, whether we like it or not, we will no longer be the same. Our brains, while never forgetting the laws of physics, will increasingly adapt to the laws of this new, digital physics.

The first time you use this feature, you have to authenticate with each of the social networks. Once configured, links are published to your Facebook News Feed and to your Twitter stream. (Note: Facebook Connect only works on Firefox at present). An option to email items instead is also provided.

The individual articles found in RSS feeds also have a sharing option which is activated by clicking on a yellow star next to the word "share." This feature lets you save articles with an optional note for later reading . The saved articles are placed in your private activities section.

It is this last feature that has Netvibes' users up in arms. Because the star and link reside on a separate line beneath the article headline and introductory text, it takes up valuable screen real estate which impacts the number of entries which can be displayed on a page. Out of 26 some comments (at time of writing) on the Netvibes blog, a surprising majority of them (25) were against the yellow star for this very reason. Everyone was requesting that this feature be optional, so they could shut it off.

Although 25 people aren't the entire Netvibes user base, they are a good representative of the most enthusiastic of Netvibes users - the ones who take the time to read and respond to the company blog entries. In this case, we think they may have a point. Hopefully Netvibes will take this into consideration and make some tweaks.

However, the user outrage issue shouldn't overshadow the big news of the day: a Facebook Connect sighting in the wild! We just love those. After Netvibes fixes the above issue, the new sharing features are likely to become popular ways to make the entire Netvibes experience more social and fun.

What's a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. Below are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.

Joshua Porter's three-part series from last summer is the best overview of UX design focused on social websites that we've seen. It's framed in terms of things not to do, but there's great advice here like don't focus on too many different features, don't overfocus on the social value without delivering direct personal value (what Porter calls the "Del.icio.us Lesson" - personal value precedes network value) and don't fail to archive knowledge for re-use so your community manager doesn't have to spend all their time answering the same elementary questions from every new user.

This series is a great place to start and it alone should give any company a lot to think about and implement.

Trevor van Gorp, Boxes and Arrows
Design for Emotion and Flow

Trevor van Gorp wrote an article in this month's issue of Boxes and Arrows about "flow." We're most familiar with this concept from Kathy Sierra's discussion of it.

Van Gorp defines flow as an experience characterized by users feeling:
* Total concentration and focused attention
* A sense of control over interactions
* Openness to new things
* Increased exploratory behavior
* Increased learning
* Positive feelings

That's what we want from the apps we use! That kind of experience will keep us engaged for long enough to invest time and other resources that we'll want to come back to and it will give us the emotional incentive to do so, as well.

How can you help your users get into such a mode? Check out van Gorp's post and the conversation in comments.

Steve Psomas, UXMatters
The Five Competencies of User Experience Design

The above tips and perspectives are a great start, but if you can swing it it's a good idea to hire someone who specializes in UX work. Whether you're interested in evaluating prospects for that hire more intelligently or looking for more information about the field for yourself, Steve Psomas's article on UX competencies really helps the reader understand the details of the field. Read this one and you'll be much better informed about the world of UX.

Also worth reading for anyone is Luke Wroblewski's October post on UXMatters titled Scalable Design, where you can find tips on planning your product and site design today to enable easier growth and change in the future. Who wouldn't want to do that?

Next Steps

Case studies are a great way to learn about anything. After an initial exposure to the resources above, we recommend checking out the following:

• Garret Dimon's in-depth analysis of the excellent design at GetSatisfaction.com. Satisfaction is a model service and Dimon articulates the thinking behind it and its impact on users beautifully. This is one of our favorite case studies, but you can keep find a running list of others in places like http://delicious.com/tag/ux+casestudy.
• Ready to make yourself a case study? SilverBack is a new Mac app that systematizes usability testing. The service records your testing users' reactions to various parts of your service. Dimon again, from above, provides a really deep walk-through of the service in his latest post. SilverBack is getting good reviews, but we'd love to know what you think of it, too.

Conclusion: UX Matters

The above are some of our favorite UX resources and we can't emphasize enough how important this kind of thing is for new startups. You can have the most wonderful idea in the world and if your site suffers usability or user experience problems then your odds of survival are not good. We want you, friends with startups, to survive and thrive.

Let us know about your favorite User Experience resources in comments below.

Image: "Forever Flowing" Creative Commons licensed by Lisa Ruokis

Called The Concept Series, the project will track down and share future web concepts submitted through a very simple process. What would you like the web to look like in the future? We offer one of our favorite visions below.

There are few things more important to the user experience than the interface through which we interact with the web. There is SO much potential for improvement in user interfaces! We wrote about some cutting edge strategies in this post in March, User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload (see the awesome 2D/3D game interface at the end of that post). Lately we've been inspired by the interfaces of apps like Skitch (see video at the very bottom of the page) and Jive's ClearSpace.

The First Round of Ideas

As any good call to action should, Mozilla's Concept Series kicked off with some examples of concepts submitted. All three of the videos below are very well produced but Mozilla says that you can submit mockups, prototypes or ideas expressed with any degree of sophistication. For instructions on making a submission visit the Concept Series announcement or just tag an image "mozconcept" on Flickr. That's what we did with our vision below these videos.

What I'd Like to See

Here's my vision of an interface I'd like to interact with the web through, though it probably wouldn't take much Mozilla energy to make it happen.

I love the Adobe AIR newsticker Snackr but more than that what I want are big pastel-colored buttons that appear wherever I'm interacting with information that I can assign tasks to. As may buttons as I want, with tasks that will send URLs or the information in those pages to another application or webpage. I'd like the buttons to have rounded corners, too. :)

In the image above I've got buttons to bookmark the link I'm looking at in my social bookmarking tool (I use Ma.gnolia), to open tabs searching for the links present in one of my Custom Search Engines, to search for this link in social media discussion aggregator YackTrack and to IM the link to multiple co-workers via Adium. In time I might find that there are other functions I'd like to add, re prioritize or replace the above with. It that too muck to ask? I don't think it is at all. Let me know when someone has built it - but for now, I'll tag it "mozconcept" and cross my fingers.

What about you, what would you like to see the future of the web look like?