Category: People

I’m happy to see a new interview with Joy Mountford, as I entered this whole field after hearing her lecture at New York University (during her tenure at Apple) over 10 years ago. The idea that someone with a psychology background was making computers easier to use was revolutionary for me. This is only a chat, but she includes some good points…

I think that every five years there has been a shift of the interface paradigm that I have worked within, which also paralleled technology industry waves. Defense business interests shifted into the AI knowledge worker space, then from the specialized AI work into personal computing (Apple), and then consumer electronics (Interval). Now my interests are in ubiquitous computing or the advent of “smart everyday objects.” …Businesses ask me to offer insights on the future of “computing”. That’s obviously a gigantic subject, so I usually talk to them about those user interface paradigms transitions…

I invited some film people to come and work in my group (at Apple) and create new uses and directions for it. They helped create Navigable Movies, which was the precursor to QuickTime VR… I think this was a really good illustration of what happens when you put technology in the hands of people who think of doing different things with it. I believe interface people should foster such creativity and experiments by encouraging some different things to happen.

I’m actually obsessed right now about why everything’s so miniature. People are not getting smaller, yet the displays and control surfaces are. I want the biggest buttons. I don’t care what it costs.

There’s a big difference between industrial design and interface design. …experience design takes place over time… A solution may be found quickly but experience occurs over time — belonging to a bigger space.

I miss the purity of products. I like to know that when I buy a phone it just makes phone calls and is optimally designed for that.

Plowing through research on navigation, just about everyone cites user expertise as a factor, regardless of the task being studied.

I’d like a better, more quantifiable, way to summarize a user’s level of expertise in a persona. This could lead to generalizations about what types of interaction will work for certain types of user.

Jakob Nielson, in Usability Engineering (as cited here), divides computer users into six categories along three dimensions based on the user’s experience: users with minimal computer experience and users with extensive computer experience for the dimension of knowledge about computers in general; novice users and expert users for the dimension of expertise in using the specific system; and user ignorant about the domain and users knowledgeable about the domain for the dimension of understanding of the task domain.

Thanks Jakob.

Notes on What Do Web Users Do? An Empirical Analysis of Web Use (PDF) by Andy Cockburn and Bruce McKenzie, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. It was published in 2000, meaning the work was done earlier, but I still found the results useful.

They looked at the title, URL and time of each page visit, how often they visited each page, how long they spent at each page, the growth and con- tent of bookmark collections, as well as a variety of other aspects of user interaction with the web.

They only looked on 17 people, but gathered a lot of data on them. Netscape v4.x browsers.

Page views per person: The mean daily page visit count was approximately 42 pages for each user per day… …earlier studies… had approximate daily visit count means of fourteen (Catledge & Pitkow 1995) and twenty one (Tauscher & Greenberg 1997).

How often they revisited pages: Previous studies have shown that revisitation (navigating to a previously visited page) accounts for 58% and 61% of all page visits. Our study shows that page revisitation is now even more prevalent, accounting for 81% of page visits when calculated across all users.

This raises questions of how we can focus our sites, or individual pages, given how they are revisited, especially if a goal of the site is loyalty. Put another way, if users are loyal to certain pages, how should that affect the navigation?

Temporal aspects: The results show that browsing is rapidly interactive. Users often visit several pages within very short periods of time, implying that many (or most) pages are only displayed in the browser for a short period of time. Figure 3 shows that the most frequently occurring time gap between subsequent page visits was approximately one second, and that gaps of more than ten seconds were relatively rare.

Whereas Dillon discusses navigation as meaning in a context of info seeking, this result talks more about users having route knowledge, again with implications for navigation. A typical user comment: ‘I’ve never bookmarked the library’s search page. I keep forgetting because once I’m there I start my search rather than thinking to bookmark it. Anyway, I’ve got a good shortcut. First, I click `Home’ which takes me to the Department’s homepage, then I click on the link to the University’s homepage, and from there I click on `Departments’ and then `Libraries’. It takes quite a few clicks, but it doesn’t take too long.’

So when devising an interaction model, it’s good to consider the nature of the content and navigation as well as whether the users are new are repeat.

A community doesn’t exhibit homogeneous web use: These results show that there was a surprising lack of overlap in the pages visited by this fairly homogeneous community of users.

Conclusions: the authors offer now familiar recommendations, such as support revisitation, design pages to load quickly, shorten navigation paths, and minimize transient pages. Of course doing this is the real world is harder. Should all pages load quickly, or is it alright for ‘destination’ pages (with target content) to be larger? If we have a lot of information but must shorten navigation paths, should websites be smaller?

Thank you Andy and Bruce.

‘Of course — If I’m going to have a watch, I’m going to have a watch that can make graphs. Yes I realize this is funny. ‘

And via James: ‘the fly affords being peed on.‘

“Women are not flowers, why should they want to smell like flowers?” – Coco Chanel

Just discovered Alex Wright’s site, agwright.com, I didn’t realize he kept a blog.

Just browsed through James Lileks‘s new book The Gallery of Regrettable Food and it’s hilarious. I read through the first 20 pages in the bookstore and laughed out loud at every one. And it’s chock full of that sumptuous 50’s pastel artwork.

On designing iht.com: ‘I feel with sites like the IHT that radical change is often not good, purely for the sake of design. It is expensive, time consuming, requires change on the user’s part, disrupts the publishing work flow and opens up all the problems which come with software development.‘

@ Ordinary Life

On Razorfish Tokyo: ‘I can tell you that the energy in the office is like night and day compared to my old gig. It’s nice to have actual projects moving forward for actual clients–high-profile ones, at that–and a management structure that understands and values information architecture.‘

On the best IA tool: ‘The tool that most reliably produces sound architecture, as far as I’m concerned, is a functioning ear. IA is something that should be done by talking to people (primarily users, clients, and developers), asking the right questions, and listening carefully to the answers.‘

@ Digital Web