MM London Mobile UI comments
Steve Ives talk I didn’t like. I didn’t like the thought that “user experience” testing was a novel thing. Putting the UI process down on paper is really basic. I also didn’t like the fact he advertised Taptu had 15-odd technology patents. He suggested I go to Google patent search to find what they are. No thanks and after visiting their Web page I don’t see anything innovative about mobile ring tone search. I wonder what kind of money they spend on doing “user testing” in their “mobile lab”. Opensource feedback channels are a lot cheaper and more valuable…
For example how do I leave a quick comment on Taptu’s feedback page? It says I have to log in! PLEASE. With Webconverger people leave really valuable feedback on a form that doesn’t even require an email.
My big problem with user experience testing described by Taptu and Scott Weiss was the short term nature of it. Getting a group of people in to test unfamiliar applications on unfamiliar devices for their impressions is just so naive. As mentioned before the opensource community feedback model is so much further advanced by being ongoing.
Scott Weiss’s Motorola comments were also disturbing. Using Motorola as an example of what happens when you don’t do their form of user experience testing was poor taste. His reasoning regarding RAZR’s fourth soft key (wtf?) for Motorola’s poor performance of late was ever so slightly far fetched!
UI design and testing is rather relative. My collegue reminded me how first impressions of the Iphone was. Not good! Iphone won my respect over time. Another friend said to me how highly skilled testing really is. User experience is not really about getting people off the street and video-ing them.
Bryan Rieger’s talk on saving bytes by talking to your developers was better. But still a little misguided. Designers should know the limitations of CSS etc. on their target platforms like Iphone without “romancing” engineers. Bryan’s talk of a “less bytes” approach with say composite images was good, however he went too far by suggesting to generate graphics on the fly. Yes, that’s less bytes, but that’s very inflexible when you need a designer to change a graphic. Plus, most importantly, generating graphics from code doesn’t work on the most pervasive application platform on mobiles. The Web!
So uncharacteristically I didn’t ask any questions last mobile monday London UI because I thought I would just offend them if I spoke. To conclude I think their form of “corporate user testing” is far too expensive for the small company patent-free innovators. I don’t see how companies like Human factors can claim to have any “usability know-how”. Have you seen “Human factors” Web page? It’s overloaded! And the URL is laughable. If people are interested in usability and good UI design, check out useit and Edward Tufte.
April 8th, 2008 at 9:27 am
I didn’t attend the event, but I intend to agree on most points mentioned here. If UI testing is about asking novice users about first impressions of a UI it’s not a very meaningful judgment for actual users, which want to use the UI in the longer term.
A low learning curve of adapting/using a UI doesn’t necessarily correlates with high usability in the long term. Actually the opposite is the case—a fairly simple to adapt UI might be rather inefficient and unusable in the long term for actual users, because it provides quite trivial and hence limited ways of interactions.
See the vi vs notepad editors as an example. Notepad is easy to use from the right beginning, but it is very limited in the longer term—nobody wants to use it for serious work, whereas vi is very difficult to use without learning, but once learned it is perfect for serious work.
Or as a different example, see the cumbersome setup/configuration dialogs in the control panel of Windows—they are quite easy to maintain, but if a user knows which settings/options he wants to modify, its far more efficient to do it the low-level way—but such users haven’t been in mind for quite a long time by major software companies. Actually I believe that the software industry kind of ignores the fact, that long-term users are quite smart and would enjoy a slightly more usable UI in general.