What’s on your ux bookshelf?

I’m a bookworm. My boyfriend has even nicknamed me ‘The Bookinator’. So it figures that I have a fair few usability, ux, psychology and design books on my bookshelf. In the photo below are just some of my ux books (they don’t all fit on my bookcase!).

I’d recommend for ux beginners:

Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Excellent introduction to usability explained simply with clear and fun diagrams. Short book that you can read in a couple of hours.

My personal favourite:

Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? (Voices That Matter)
Very clever techniques for web design. Uses lots of persuasion principles and social proofing elements. I have about 20 post-it notes stuck in this one!

Prettiest book:

Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands
This book is beautiful. Large inspiring pictures, brilliant graphic design work, key points easy to identify… The only downside is the book’s message seems to be duplicated quite a lot within the content. It’s still a joy to dip into and has good examples to demonstrate the points it makes.

I wish I hadn’t bought:

Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics Methods
Warning! This book will bore the pants off you. It’s written in the most long winded technical manner that aims to bore even the most devoted ux professional.

The book i’ve had the longest:

Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour
This book is like an old friend. It’s been with me since university and has all the damage to prove it, including lots of crinkley pages where my old uni windowsill leaked all over it. This book saw me through my coursework and exams and I just find the content fascinating. Timeless.

So that’s what’s on my ux bookshelf. Now it’s your turn.
What’s on your ux bookshelf?

Chicken and Egg by Kai Brunner

Great video. I especially like the part which shows a frustrated user using a bad website

Influence through storytelling

Simply an amazing and inspiring presentation. Watch it.

10 Handy hints to check a ux agency or freelancer is genuine

As UX and usability become more well known, there is an unfortunate downside for clients and that is cowboys. These are people who have perhaps read a UX book and decide to set themselves up as experts. To help you spot the expert from the amateur i’ve created some handy hints. You don’t need to do all of these, just enough to satisfy you that the agency or freelancer knows their stuff and is genuine.

1. Check out their website Is it easy to use? Does it have clear call to actions? Are they using good copywrite? Does the layout of the text aid scanability? Is the navigation clear? Is the font readable? They should be practicing what they preach. If the site is badly designed, alarm bells should ring.

2. Read the About Us section Are they easily identifiable? (photo and name), Can you check their reputation and credibility via links to LinkedIn or Twitter? Read their experience closely – do they have professional qualifications and experience or are they a marketing company who have read a few books on the subject?

3. Check their Twitter posts Do they contribute to the world of usability by tweeting useful links? Do they help other people? Do they seem credible?

4. Check their Twitter followers Are they following and been followed by thousands of people? (they may have been on a mass following mission). Check who’s following them – if there are other agencies and usability professionals following them, they probably post good, knowledgeable tweets.

5. Read testimonials Get a feel for the type of person they are and how they work by what other clients thought.

6. Look at their previous work Ask to see their portfolio. This will give you a good idea of the standard of their work and what they are capable of.

7. Read their blog Owning and updating a blog deserves credit. It takes a lot of time and effort and shows it is important to them to give back to the profession. You can get a feel for the person and what they’re passionate about by what they write and the style they use.

8. Check their Facebook page How many people have joined their page? What have people posted on the wall?

9. Engage with them Email or talk to them. Prepare your questions if necessary.

10. Meet them Prepare your questions and more importantly see if you get along, after all, none of us want to work with people who we don’t click with.

The first usability book I ever bought

For a while now i’ve been wondering where my old favourite usability book was, then whilst I was clearing out an old box of books I found it! Christine Faulkner’s The Essence of Human-Computer Interaction. It was the first usability book I bought when I was at uni and it remained my favourite right up until I discovered Steve Krugg.

It’s a little dated now, however it’s still brilliant. It has all the basics you need to know, it reads easily and being a thin book it’s great as a quick reference tool. I always preferred to sit down and read it compared to the heavy going Jenny Preece and Alan Dix HCI books that were around when I was at uni!

Although it’s 13 years old, it’s still a good read, especially for the beginner and you can pick it up from just 78p on Amazon! Bargain!

Amazon fails on heuristic ‘user control and freedom’

Yesterday I decided to have a clear out and sell some of my stuff on Amazon. I prefer selling on Amazon to Ebay as it’s much quicker and easier – no need to mess around taking pictures of items and entering lots of details.

One of the items I was intending to sell wasn’t worth much, and my planned sell price was only £1.90. So when I came to the following screen and saw the fees Amazon would charge me for placing this listing would be £1.47 I decided it wasn’t worth the effort and to cancel the listing.

Here’s the screen:

How would you cancel this listing? (click on the picture to enlarge it)

What I expected to see here was some kind of button (or hyperlink) saying something along the lines of ‘cancel listing’, ‘don’t submit’, even ‘back’ would have been better than nothing. When I couldn’t see anything to do this I tried pressing the amazon.co.uk logo, thinking this would take me to the home page but it was inactive at this stage.

Nielsen’s Heuristic ‘User control and freedom’

One of the famous usability heuristics states that you should always let the user have control and freedom over their actions. There should always be a clearly marked exit route in case the user doesn’t want to progress further or if they have unintentionally entered a screen and they need to go back.

There is a useful usability evaluation checklist for websites from infodesign. Using this checklist, we can identify three points where amazon could improve this particularly screen:

• There should be a clearly-identified link to the Home page
• The user should be able to able to cancel all operations
• There should be a clear exit point on every page

FREE GUIDE How To Design: Login Forms

I’ve been hard at work this morning creating a guidelines document on how to design amazing, easy to use, login forms. It’s completely free for you to download. I hope you find it helpful. There is a useful checklist at the end which you can use as a quick reference for your designs.

If you like it then please feel free to pass it on to others. Together, we can make login forms easy to use!

Click here to download your free guide

Login Forms: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

After reading 100 outstanding login forms, I was surprised just how bad a lot of login forms were in terms of usability! Do these people not want users to login to their sites? So i’m going to pick on a few of them and you’ll see what makes a login form good, bad and just downright ugly.

The Good

This is how it’s done guys. Why is this form so good?

• Clear title ‘Member Sign In’
• Clear labelling of username and password fields
• Nice big call-to-action ‘Sign in’ button.
• Button to ‘Register’ in case the user pressed sign in by mistake.
• Links for both forgotten username and forgotten password
• Clean page keeps the users focus on the task.

The Bad

Oh my! There’s pink and then there’s PINK! So, firstly this hurts your eyes doesn’t it? The smaller white text is also quite difficult to read because the pink overwhelms it, diluting the white so it actually looks like a light pink (poor readability). There is no help for if you have forgotten which email address you used to sign up to the site. There is no help if you have forgotten your password. There is no link to the sign up page. And if we’re going to be picky, we could point out the inconsistency between the way they have spelt ‘Login’ in the title, ‘log in’ on the first line and ‘Log-in’ on the button.

The Ugly

Oh dear! This doesn’t even look finished does it? There is no indication of what the user should type in which field. There is no help at all for forgotten login details or password. In fact there is no link to any kind of help at all! When we say ‘keep it simple, keep it usable’ we don’t mean to this extent!

What I noticed on a lot of the login forms was a lack of help for users who may have forgotten their username or the email address they used to sign up. There were plentiful links for forgotten passwords. These days users have multiple email addresses and usernames so it’s good practice to include help in your login form for if they forget which one they used.

Just another before you go…. The Confusing!

Hmmm can you work this one out? ‘Keep me logged in until I log out’. Isn’t this how sites normally work on the internet, i.e. you login to a site and you stay logged in until you press the logout button. So why is there a checkbox? Does this mean that if you don’t tick the box, when you press the logout button, you won’t actually be logged out?

How many UX people does it take to lock a door?

We experienced the door lock from hell this weekend. The simple task of locking a bedroom door turned into major STRESS!

Background:
Attending wedding. Time VERY tight. Going to be late if don’t leave immediately.

The problem:
Hotel room door will not lock!

Current mental model:
Put key in lock……turn key……door locks

What actually happens:
Put key in lock….turn key….try putting key in upside down…still won’t lock…turn key again…..open, close door….keep turning key….slam door….shake door handle… after several attempts and visions of entering church after the bride, I rush downstairs to get help, leaving UX boyfriend with Satan’s lock.

Solution:
Receptionist casually informs me of a small panel attached to the INSIDE of the door explaining how to lock the door, which apparently can only be done from the inside. The fact that this notice is there shows that this must be a common problem. But it’s on the inside of the door! People lock doors from the outside as well as the inside.

Skill required:
It turns out that locking the door isn’t as simple as following the instructions on the panel. Skill is also required. The instructions say to twist to lock, however, after much trying we discover that you also need to hold the handle stable with the other hand to get the lock part to turn.

Danger!
Not only is this locking method not intuitive and difficult to do but it also increases the risk that the guest will leave their key in their room as they aren’t required to use the key to lock the door.

So, how many UX people does it take to lock a door? 2 with the help of a hotel receptionist already familiar with the method of locking.

Did we make it to the church on time? Unfortunately, we arrived after the bride (upon seeing the empty bridal car, panic and cursing of the hotel door ensued) but we managed to sneak into our seats before she walked down the aisle. Phew!!!

What to Expect in 2010: UX/UI Design Simplicity

I recommend you have a read of this article by WebDesignerWall if you’re interested in UX trends for 2010. I particularly agree with every site having a mobile version. I’ve thought for a while now that mobile is going to be the biggest access point for the internet in the very near future. The only thing stopping this was screen sizes and cost but we have seen a huge improvement in the last year on both of these in the form of touchscreen phones and flat rate unlimited data price plans. I love the ‘Clean and simple’ point too, but that goes without saying

Here are the 2010 trends the article discusses:

- Clean and simple

- Single page websites

- Sliders

- Modal boxes

- Smart navigation and taskbars

- Text as the new image

- Larger page layouts

- Mobile version of every site

- eCommerce tweaker shopping

- Smart forms