Walden 7

This building was finished in 1974 when Barcelona was facing the need of sheltering thousands of workers coming from different places. The aim of this work was to avoid typical appartment blocks that look like huge gray boxes. There was a big need for social housing but also for interactions and a feeling of society for a new community.

Anna Bofill Levi explained that they were thinking in the user the whole time, talking with potential residents before the construction and getting feedback several years after construction. The result of such a user centered design was a place were people naturally interact and communicate.

Walden 7 has shops, bars, terraces, gardens, patios and swimming pools connected through bridges, balconies and trails. The configuration resembles the one of a medieval city.

The facade is also special, it looks like a huge red fortification wall connecting interior and exterior through big windows.

The Power of a User Centered Design

Thinking in the user experience from the beginning was clearly positive for the project. What started as cheap social housing ended up being a place where people don’t want to move out from, driving prices from very low to high. People living there are also organized in a community, the building has its own web page and they organize events for themselves, including annual donations for other communities. 

I was using other smart phones before and none was bringing all that information on my palm in such a pleasant and fast way. The good thing about the iPhone is that this device is not only better than other smart phones, it is much better than other old time experiences. For example, going to the library, using an atlas or a dictionary and checking emails on a desktop computer (yes, that’s old style already!)

Using an iPhone is a pleasant experience but also, and very important, a fast one. Here some examples of things that now we do faster with an iPhone:

8 Seconds to find "Kuala Terengganu" on the map (bye-bye Atlas!)

3 Seconds to have a look at my calendar (and it is synchronize!)

4 Seconds to check my emails (and I don’t have to go to my computer!)

3 Seconds to call a contact stored in my favorites list (I hate to use the land line now!)

2 Seconds to check the weather forecast.

7 Seconds to translate a word from German into English.

28 Seconds to take a photo and mail it to a friend (nothing compare to this before).

16 Seconds to buy the last Björk album and start listening to it! (imposible to imagine this a few years ago).

9 Seconds to start reading the history of Italy on Wikipedia.

18 Seconds to find a list of nearby restaurants, with AroundMe app (totally imposible in the past, do you remember the Yellow Pages?)

19 Seconds to start listening my favorite Brazilian radio (selecting from a list of many others).

1 Second to listing to my digital music.  

All these work because of a great interface that makes the whole user experience just fantastic. What do you do faster with it? Or maybe with another mobile device?  

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.

Including branding in the whole website design could also improve usability, making a particular website a more comfortable place to surf through. Many companies are taking advantage of this, Apple, for example, is not only successful because of a beautiful design but they also combine easiness and first class interaction design to the whole branding and marketing strategy on the web.

In this bread crumbs example the Apple logo shows the user the safe way back home:

Tag Line

Adding a tag line to the logo is another way to improve the overall website usability and could also have a direct impact on visits. The message to deliver here is called the “value proposition” and the aim is to tell users what the goal of your site is (e.g. what you are selling!). If the user is not able to figure out fast what the site is about, he or she might leave to never come back.

The tag line is usually placed below the logo or very close to it. It should be a short phrase explaining in a very easy language what the website has to offer. It also has to be precise and should not use estrange words, like site-related ones.

Wikipedia makes very clear what the website is about. The free encyclopedia.

Is Safari a website about trips in Africa or is it one dedicated to a web browser? This tag line does not confuse users, it tells them straight away that this site has online books. 

Sometimes the tag line is integrated into the website functionality. For example, del.icio.us places the logo, the company name and the most meaningful link of the website together. "Your bookmarks" gives a strong message.

Logo position 

Logo position is another example of how branding could improve usability. There is a tendency to place the logo on the upper left corner, but that’s not the most important issue regarding the logo position. The key is to place the logo in the same place website-wide. That will orientate users and remind them that they are still in the same website.

At Amazon, the logo stays in the very same place through the entire website.

 

The user experience as brand

More is less, right? This is true for many fields but specially for web design as adding links, buttons, features, information and pictures is always tempting. More than designers, [many] programmers have the opinion that if a feature is available it should be presented to the user. User tests prove that that could be dangerous.

The aim of any product should be to create a positive user experience, something that users will consciously or unconsciously notice and appreciate. Usability has a strong impact on the user and that’s why it could be used as a branding approach. Branding is the packaging for a particular idea, like an easy to use and effective search engine could be. The following pictures show two websites offering basically the same service. But which brand has more value for the user? the one filling the page with features?

Emails, usability and branding

Emails are part of the website design and they could improve the overall user experience, here the brand could also be an important tool to help users. A key issue is the brand (the company name) included in the sender field of every email sent by a website. It seems to be obvious but many websites send notifications with the sender field "mail robot" (notice that many users would label that as spam.)

In this email client screen shot it is possible to see the sender field in the first column and the subject in the second column.

Germanwings, an airline, places the company name in the sender field of each email. But they have variations:

Germanwings > This means "advertisement", it could be deleted,

Germanwings Schedule Cha. > This means that the email contains very important information,

Germanwings Booking > Meaning that this email could be saved (and retrieved) for later reference.

The impact of using these techniques could be huge as they could prevent user from deleting important information and save a big amount of money in live customer service.

Trust

Giving users a feel of trust is something that could be done through a good design and attaching the idea of trust to a brand something usually desirable. One approach is to encourage trust through security features shown on a website.

A good label for the login button could improve a website and brand trust. Like at Amazon.com:

If a person knows that undoing a buy is easy (and possible) the trust a customer has for a service will be increased. For example at Wal-Mart deleting products from the shopping cart is easy:

Conclusion

I have been an unhappy Nokia E61 user for a year or so (they are still selling that model). The interface is horrible and the whole telephone is very slow. I managed to load music into my phone only once, I never did it again. OK, OK, Nokia is the number one phone maker but that might be because they are making a good business in the third world selling cheap phones.

The new Music Store

Designing with standards and for everybody should be something that customers and designers themselves should fight for. When I tried to see the new Nokia Music Store a beautiful "Unsupported Browser" message was displayed. GREAT. The only system combination that works with it is the Windows-Internet Explorer one.    

My point

This is not what customers want, specially here in Europe where Firefox has a 30% market share, in some EU countries with market share higher then 40% (as reported by Ars Technica in January 2008). In a perfect world we would design for standard browsers, but the world is not perfect. Making a service available for different browsers is something that it’s going to affect the usability of it.

We are not talking about a startup, we are talking a huge company. So why not spending some more money to make products available for all?

The first mail came from Google, it was actually coming from "noreplay" and the subject was "New Optional Benchmarking Feature Available in Google Analytics". That was it, no link to get farther information, no content in the email. At all. Then I went to my Analytics account, there was an item for the new feature in the menu but nothing inside. OK, this could be a new feature that is coming but the way they announced it was a little bit careless (maybe arrogant?).

Don’t get me wrong, I do really admire Google. They usually make good marketing, they design good processes and they care about usability. And that’s why the following email makes me angry:

The second email making me angry today comes from the Apple iTunes Store (Germany). Yeah, I love my iPod and I love Apple products but lets have a look at the following email. Apple decided today that they wanted to send me spam, OK, it was not unsolicited email because I signed up for the newsletter, but the information on it was as useless and aggressive as spam could be.

The "iTunes alert me" newsletter should recommend me music I might like. Today, Apple sent me an email offering me an album I already have, one that I listen to very often and one that has been released 4 years ago. I am sure Apple already knows all that, so why bothering me with so useless information?

- Old browsers might not be able to display some multimedia files

- Some browsers might not have the necessary plugins and the user might not be able to update it (or might not want to)

- Impaired people could have problems interacting with multimedia

- Visually impaired people could need a text version of the multimedia file to be read by web readers

- Not every body has a high speed internet connection to download multimedia files

Why should you care?  Improving usability helps everybody surfing your website, not only the impaired ones. Imagine that you trying to teach something through multimedia content, like a video; giving text explanation of what is going on in that video could improve the understanding of the idea you are trying to teach.

An image or video says a lot, but you could add much more value to that if you provide equivalent text for that media. At the end, if the user is able to see that media anyways, the text will increase the understanding of the message you are trying to deliver.

Let me play, Google. I was playing with the AdWords configuration and think that the Google advertisement configuration website could be a little bit improved. I’m new there but still I think the whole interface is a little bit messy. But there is one [more] thing that Google is making in a great way, they are using an interactive graphic to teach users about the AdWords settings. You might think that this is obvious, but unfortunately not everybody is using this kind of simplicity to explain things. Have a closer look:

As the user selects between Lower Budget and Higher Budget the primary and the secondary effects change, in this case the number of impressions and the clicks. The graphic also makes clear that the ad position does not change.

Same as before, the user plays between Lower and Higher CPC to see what the primary and secondary effects are.

This interactive graphic tries to explain something a little bit complicated, the use of keywords, but it is very successful giving clear examples.

"give them the chance to control all that data all the time…"

Most users will accept to give you some information, specially if you give them the chance to control all that data all the time. That’s why it’s important to give users an easy access to the privacy settings, make that link highly visible, like Facebook does.

Facebook has also a good privacy settings page design. They grouped the settings in different categories. Once inside the category the user has great amount of options. My first impression was that this was too much, but if the website gives the option to deactivate single features there are more possibilities for the others to remain active.

Advanced options…

"Centralize personal data…"

Putting all the user information together in one place make users happy. Centralize personal data, profile settings and password changing options. For example Xing.com, the business network, put all that together.

Another good design decision would be to make that very useful account page accessible from the whole site. Make the link to it visible as much as possible. Xing places a link to it from every single page (highly visible on the homepage and then at the bottom).