Google Voice interface. Image from funkyspacemonkey.com

It’s difficult to imagine a keypad interface clearer than the one of Google Voice for iPhone. Everything is in the right place, there are no possibilities for confusion.

The Android interface. Picture by xda-developers.com

The Android keypad is not bad, but I’m a little bit skeptical about the lack of separation among the number columns and about the fact that buttons don’t look like buttons. Still, I think it might work pretty well most of the time.

Windows Mobile keypad interface. Picture by extremeppc.com

The Windows Mobile keypad interface could be a little bit confusing, I don’t like the fact that numbers are located on the right side of the buttons (instead of being in the center). Some people, specially the ones with big fingers, might accidentally press on the wrong button if they try to tap on the number and not in the center of the button. This configuration could also be a little bit disturbing for the users’ eye, humans tend naturally to look for symmetric signs and this buttons lack of that harmony.

Door keypad in Starbucks. Picture by Alexis Brion.

The last example is coming from the physical, real, world, not from a software interface. This is the keypad to unlock the toilet door at the Starbucks located in the Düsseldorf central station. I was sitting close to it and I couldn’t help watching the clients fail several times when trying to enter the code. Numbers are not located on the buttons, they are below them. Users were confusing labels: which is the number 5 button?

Elderly person talking on the phone. Picture by Deutsche Telekom.

Telephones are always a problem

Elderly people seem to be perfect victims for most home telephones and cellphones. They are difficult to use and they offer a lot of functions that many don’t understand how to find. But telephones are devices with a lot of importance to people, specially during emergencies.

Some companies have been designing telephones for the elderly, for example Doro. Big buttons and limited functions make the following phone a hit for those looking for simplicity. I find the possibility of writing the names on the same phone a great improvement for the older ones.

Doro phone for the elderly. Picture by Doro.

Digital menus

Navigating through menus on a tiny screen is a problem for a lot of people. Many get lost and don’t understand how to select, scroll or go back to the beginning. Interaction designers at Emporia, like at Doro, have been having this in mind and add a memory help notebook directly on the phone. Note that the notebook is all the time facing the user (and not in the back of the headset like in many home phones).

Emporia Time phone for the elderly. Picture by Emporia.

Functionality over style?

Designs for the elderly tend to be ugly: huge buttons, huge letters on a huge screen and terrible colors. But designing for the elderly is designing for all and if the designer is able to produce something appealing to everybody the product could be probably sold to a larger number of people.

The Deutsche Telekom released a home telephone that was initially thought to target the elderly. Not surprisingly a lot of young families are buying the phone. It has big numbers but they still look nice, it has fast dialing buttons and a paper notebook on the charging base.

Again, less digital menus

Something that people are requesting is to have more physical buttons. The Deutsche Telekom placed the answering machine controls on the charging station to make the listening of new messages easier.

Sinus A210 phone designed for the elderly and everybody. Picture be Deutsche Telekom.

That need for adding features

This telephone is including a flashlight and a radio, each function with its own button. Design research might have been revealed that those are important features for elderly people. But they also seem to be there just because it was possible to add something else. A dedicated button for a radio, do we really need that on a cell phone? Is that going to improve the user experience?

Doro phone with radio. Picture by Doro.

First Case

Traveling to the Bavarian alps on a beautiful, high-tech train, I was doing something that the designers of it didn’t do: observing how people use doors and in particular how they would interact with their design. I was lucky enough to be sitting in front of the toilet’s door, enjoying the possibility to look at the passengers trying to deal with the door.

The design: the door had a door handle, a yellow button and a huge sticker indicating that people are not supposed to use the door handle to open the door; instead they should press the button.

What happened here? After many passenger breaking the "automatic" doors, designers decided to add an sticker to their design to try to fix it. Did it work? Obviously not:

Second Case

In Mar del Plata, one of the biggest cities in Argentina, people have been paying bus tickets with cash using machines installed on the buses. This system has recently been changed by another one that uses magnetic cards. These cards have to be loaded with electronic money at city kiosks; once on the bus passengers use the cards to paid for their trip.

The problem with the new design: people that were used to pay using cash were trying to introduce coins and bills inside the magnetic card reader. Probably, hundreds of readers got wroken and had to be replaced.

The solution: designers (or maybe the people in charge of the system) tried to fix the poorly designed system with a sticker saying "DO NOT INTRODUCE COINS". Did it work? Probably not well. 

Why this is happening and what could have been done?

These two products, the high tech door and the card reader, were probably designed without taking into account many parts of the system. Observing a few people interacting with the train door would have been enough to notice that people would try to open the door using the door handle if there is one (and not a button). The same applies to the card reader, designers probably never got on a bus and observed people using the old ticket machines.

Specially hardware design flaws are difficult and very expensive to solve. In most cases a sticker would probably not solve the problem and would make the whole user experience even more confusing. 

A user centered design process should have prevented these design failures: doing field research, talking with people and observing what they need and how they behave in their environment.

The Apple Push Notification service provides a way of alerting about new information, even when the user is not running the application. Alerts come in three flavors: it could be a numbered badge to be displayed on the application’s icon, it could also be a sound or it could be a text alert.

Looking at the feature from the user experience point of view, in my opinion, the numbered badges are great, sound alerts are just "OK" but text alerts are wrong. Text alerts will be highly distracting and might remind to disturbing message alerts found on Windows systems, like this one:

Alerts are a great opportunity for developers and companies, specially for the ones developing IM services or critical applications that need users’ attention. On the other hand, I can imagine that a lot of these people could be tempted to abuse of the feature; ESPN, for example, announced that they would be sending 50 million notifications each month.

Apple has been creating fantastic user interfaces and I can not believe they didn’t think about the implications of allowing this kind of disturbing messages on a device like the iPhone. We have to wait a few months to see how text Push Notifications will be implemented, maybe not allowing them by default could help.

Internet should make job application easier, not harder. Last weeks I have been hearing complaints from people about how tedious online applications are. Websites like CareerBuilder have good intentions as they try to simplify the process giving the possibility of uploading the CV once and send the same copy to all companies.

Unfortunately, many companies require applicants to send the CV and to fill a web form with the same information. This process could make applicants go crazy if it is not well design.
 

Sorry, there was an error, would you please fill the form again? A friend got that message a few times last week, but even once is enough to make people feel worse in a particularly bad moment. These are few things companies should keep in mind when creating a web form for job applicants:

- Make sure your web form continuously saves the information the applicant is uploading.
- Display a message confirming that the data was saved successfully.
- Make the web form simple and short.
- If the web form has to be long, divide it in steps.
- Maybe the best option is to avoid using web forms and let applicants send the CV per email.

Why a company should have a well designed application process?

- Yes, everybody wants to work at that company, but if data is lost during the saving process I’m sure not everybody will take the time to fill all that info again. That company might be missing the right applicant.

- It’s about the company’s image. Make the process simple and easy and applicants will love you and your website. 
- Applicants might think the company is playing with their time. Can you imagine the rage a company can flame if the data is lost after several minutes in front of the computer?

- Think in the moment applicants reach the company’s website and their mood. Many people apply during weekends when others are having fun or late at night after work when they are tired. This could affect the perception they get about the questions a company makes on web forms, it’s better not to abuse. 

If a company wants to hire the best ones, a good selection process might be needed to improve the whole user experience, one thought as a whole process design. These are a few questions a company should keep in mind at the moment of designing the application process: How applicants will get to my website? How are they going to apply? Do I really need a web form or should a CV upload be enough?

The Biccu Table website needed to be very graphical inorder to easily explain how the concept works and what is the table for (it’s a table for children). So we went for a video, making it the center of the website. Of course this brought some problems to the design…

Technical Issues

We got a few messages from users (actually 2) saying that they were not able to see the video. One thought that an Apple computer was needed and the other one said that the computer crashed several times during playing time. In our case this was a minimum amount of complaints in comparison to the big amount of positive feedback. But this is a warning, if you are targeting poorly technically-skilled users, keep in mind that playing video represent a challenge for some of them.

The Text

Every video, specially the ones with sound, should have an explanatory text giving information to the people that are not able to see the video (for example, visually impaired ones or for technical reasons). In our case, we noticed that the people were concentrated on the video only. Was that the desired effect? Great! For us, this was fine as the images were clear enough.

Too Long is Boring

Initially the videos we placed on the website were longer. We noticed that users were excited at the beginning but bored at the end. So, keep videos short.

Embedded Third Party Videos

Video players like the YouTube one are very popular and using them might improve usability, most users know how to use them. For us it was not an option, we wanted to have videos without ads, without external links and without any external branding.

An important part of a good design is the prevention, how to avoid erros and headaches. But, as problems can not be totally avoided it is very important to design a good "recovery" experience, a way to solve those issues. The iTunes Store gives us an example of good problem solving design. 

After buying an album I got the following invoice per email. The underlined text "Ein Problem melden" means in German language "Notify a problem". This is great. Users could have problems with downloads or audio quality, for example. If this happens they can contact Apple in a very handy way. 

Problems make users unhappy but if you provide a way to solve those issues users will understand that you are trying hard to make things work.

Some of the phones I tried at the shop made me think that some companies just put all the features possible into the smallest device possible without any usability test.

Is this the future?

A cell phone without zero… users don’t need that one, right?

Send users information that is relevant to them

Designing a newsletter that is "usable" is not an easy task but benefits could be huge: more visits and sales could be reached through good newsletter usability and marketing. Let me show you the iTunes Store "alert me" newsletter example:

The iTunes Store Newsletter

On March 13th I was criticizing Apple for sending me advertisement of an old album that I have and I listen to very often. I was wondering why they were bothering me offering an album that I already have?

 The Newsletter Now: Björk

 Yesterday I received a new iTunes Newsletter recommending me albums of my favorite artist: Björk. There are 2 important things here:

- iTunes knows that Björk is my favorite artist and sends me album recommendations of her,

- iTunes recommends me Björk albums that I don’t have (yet!)

Lesson

Send users information only when this is relevant to them. Recommend only products they might like to buy and they will happily click.

Reading the graphic it is possible to deduce the following:

1 After an initial flat phase I changed the position of the "Feeds" logo from the bottom of the website to the top. The resulting effect was the first big jump in subscriptions (around 300% in less than a month).

2 After a second "flatish" short period (second, bigger bubble on image 1) I added some instructions to the RSS Feed logo: "Subscribe to Feed, get every week fresh articles"

Lesson

A Put the tools the people need and you want to promote in a prominent position, do not assume that users will look for them.

B Tell users what you are actually offering, do not rely on images and icons. Telling people that the Design vs Art Blog is updated every week is encouraging them to subscribe.

C This tips have a marketing impact but they could be applied to everything that is on a website, potentially improving usability with a few changes.