Interaction with a product is more than how it’s used or how it behaves. It’s about a connection between two sides. One side is the customer, but the other side is much more than a product or service. To many people, the character and essence of a product and its company are identical. So, what is the essence of your product?

When your product behaves like a machine, your company is perceived to be a machine. It’s just another company – rigid, mechanical, and cold. Yet when your product displays a bit of humanity, your company gains a face and becomes another human.

In this webinar, you’ll see examples of how humanity exists in the design of products and services through humor, personality, and emotion. You’ll explore how just a little extra design effort and thought beyond functional needs can enrich the experience, reveal the company behind the product, and forge enduring connections with customers.

This presentation generated quite a buzz at Web App 2009. It’s a talk that’s sure to get you thinking
about your products, and how you foster the connection between your products and your customers.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. How do you gain an edge with your products? How does your organization show its humanity? Share your thoughts, questions, and concerns below.

You may have noticed that the last two UIEtips articles concentrated on UX teams. The first article was on Building and Managing a Successful UX Team. The second article was Five Techniques for Getting Buy-In for Usability Testing. Following the rule of three principal, I’m focusing this next article, once again, on the UX team. Today’s article goes back to December 2007 and concentrates on various skills required for a successful UX team.

Over the last 9 years, we’ve been looking carefully at how to put a user experience team together. We’ve studied dozens of teams, some that are very good at production great designs, while others regularly struggle to produce anything that makes users happy. As we’ve looked at the differences between the teams, we’ve started to notice some patterns.

One emerging pattern focuses on the skills found in the team. While it’s a no-brainer to say that the more skilled the team, the better the results, it’s more difficult to hone in on the specific skills that make a difference.

Our research has isolated eighteen skills that the best teams all master. We’ve divided these into two groups: Core UX Skills that are unique to the user experience process and Enterprise UX Skills that the team shares with other parts of the organization, such as marketing, IT, and product management.

In this issue of UIEtips, I describe these skills and a simple method for assessing where a team is at. Managers can use this assessment to identify areas of improvements for the team as a whole and individual members.

Read today’s article.

Have you assessed your team’s capabilities? What techniques have you used? Are there skills you think are important that aren’t on the list? We’d love to hear from you. Leave your thoughts below.

[If you manage a UX team, or you're part of a UX team, I think you'll find our next UIE Virtual Seminar of great interest. This Wednesday, June 17, Sarah Bloomer will present Upgrading Your UX Team. Some of the topics Sarah will touch on in this Virtual Seminar include: the key ingredients of developing a successful UX team, how to setup your team, and where it fits within the organization. Learn more about the next UIE Virtual Seminar.]

In part 2, we have new topics to muse over. Are you building out a web 2.0 strategy? Having trouble communicating and documenting the design process? How do you tie the visions of company culture and customer experience together?

We answer these burning questions and others with four more podcasts in the final part of this series. Here I focus on the following experts:

• Steve Mulder and Riccardo LaRosa on Web 2.0 Strategy and Design 
• Dan Brown on Documenting Design
• Brian Kalma on melding Zappos’ company culture with their customer experience
• Robert Hoekman on introducing design frameworks

So lets get started with this week’s podcasts.

Web 2.0 Strategy and Design with Steve Mulder and Riccardo LaRosa

When creating a web 2.0 strategy, you start thinking about what features to build, how to tell if the features are working as expected, and how results change over time. We brought these considersations to two of our favorite people when it comes to Web2.0 Strategy; Steve Mulder and Riccardo LaRosa

In this podcast, Steve and Riccardo focus on these issues and bring some great case study examples from Reebok and HumanaOne to life. We also talk about how starting small and iterating is most successful,but not an easy sell in many situations. You’ll want to listen to how they overcame this challenge and other Web 2.0 adventures they had.

Read more detail on Steve and Riccardo’s interview.

Documenting Design with Dan Brown

In this interview, Dan and I explore the documents that help make large design projects go smoothly. We discuss how these important docs can become living documents (ones that evolve when necessary) and how Dan believes there’s value in seeing them as actual team members. This may sound odd, but Dan nicely clarifies what he means in the podcast.  

During the podcast, we spent some time with two types of documents: concept models and flow charts. These particular documents are intriguing because they don’t cover concrete ideas (which are easier to document), but instead cover the higher-level abstract ideas that often power the site invisibly.

Read more detail on Dan’s interview.  

Company Culture Meets Customer Experience with Brian Kalma

Looking for ways to tie your company culture and customer experience together? Then you definitely want to hear this interview with Brian Kalma of Zappos. I reached out to Brian to find out how Zappos, a company that conducted over a billion dollars in online sales last year, brings together their web site, call center, and social media outreach, to create a unique customer experience.

Brian discusses Zappos’ four-week training program that everyone must go through within the company; how the entire company (over 1300 is part of his design team; and how Twitter and Facebook has empowered their employees to communicate with customers.

Read more detail on Brian’s interview. 

Introducing Interaction Design with Frameworks, with Robert Hoekman

So what are design frameworks anyway? Drawn loosely from the idea of coding frameworks that software developers use to more efficiently build software, design frameworks are an aid to assembling a design.

In this podcast, Robert Hoekman joins us to discuss design frameworks. You can compare frameworks to design patterns, although patterns tend to be smaller, more specific solutions. Frameworks, when built out, can contain design patterns. 

Frameworks help create consistency in interface elements to help solidify the UX. Robert uses frameworks on all his current projects. He starts out with a check list of all the main elements what will help a person accomplish a goal.

Read more detail on Robert’s interview.  

Podcast Library

The Web App Expert podcast interview series is just a small taste of the podcasts we offer. Look for our ongoing podcast show - Userability, where folks like you call in with their UX issues of the day. And we have many other podcasts on a smattering of topics from various experts.

Creating a Great User Experience at Your Organization

Brian Kalma’s podcast is all about creating a great user experience at Zappos. It’s exactly what we’re going to talk about at the UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, except we’ll be focusing on how to create a great user experience at YOUR organization. We’ll be in Seattle, Denver and Washington, DC at the end of June. Explore the program and be sure to use the promotion code SHOW09 when you register for a $75 discount off the individual price.

Enjoy the podcasts.

The answer to these questions, and many more, are in a series of podcast interviews I did with web app experts. Twitter has been abuzz over these interviews and we want to make sure you get to hear what all the tweets are about.(By the way, if you want be notified about each new podcast, or any UIE news, follow us on Twitter @uie.)

Coincidentally, all these experts presented at UIE’s Web App Summit in late April. We offer a special CD with presentations from these experts. At the end of the post, there are details on this CD offer.

In part 1 of a 2 part series, I focus on the following experts:

• Derek Featherstone on how Ajax techniques can improve accessibility
• Nathan Curtis on using patterns and component libraries and the efficiencies you gain from them
• Luke Wroblewski on frequently asked questions with web form design
• Molly Holzchlag on web standards for web apps, specifically with HTML5 and CSS3
• Richard Rutter and James Box on why they use rough interactive prototyping over traditional deliverables 

Sounds intriquing? Here are this week’s 5 podcasts. 

Ajax Aids Accessibility with Derek Featherstone

Does Ajax aid accessibility? Yes, if you do it right, using Ajax techniques can improve accessibility. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Ajax is like most techniques and technologies on the web — they are what you make of them.

In this podcast, Derek Featherstone, principal of Further Ahead, tells us that we first need to know how to think about Ajax as a design tool. Today’s toolkits (such as jQuery) can really help designers build functional prototypes to demonstrate their interaction concepts to developers, who will then integrate theirideas into the production system. Taking advantage of the many available libraries gives you a sandbox for trying out interactions without having to know the best practices for implementing the code.

More detail on Derek’s interview.

Achieving Pattern and Component Reuse with Nathan Curtis

Dealing with real-life web app production isn’t as glamorous as some aspects of design in the digital realm, but it is full of challenges and can honestly make or break a project. There are ways of truly optimizing certain aspects of the production so that you can create a product with consistent quality at a faster pace. To find out how, I turned to Nathan Curtis, principal and co-founder of EightShapes.

Hear how design pattern libraries and component libraries are defined. And how having these libraries can save you tremendous production time.

Using these repositories prevents each team from inventing their own wheels and engineering them from scratch. Nathan than compares pattern and component libraries to style guides, which were the first step toward this idea — one that is too often broken, over restrictive, and simply ignored. 

More detail on Nathan’s interview.

Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski

How many pages should my complex form be? Are Dynamic Forms a good idea? When I get questions like these and others on web form design,I turn to to Luke Wroblewski, author of Web Form Design: Filling inthe Blanks and Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design for Yahoo. Luke also has his own shop, LukeW Interface Designs.

In this podcast, you’ll hear the answers to the approve questions. Luke explains why there is no easy answer on the number of pages for complex forms and how the content should shape the form. And he’ll talke about how to use Dynamic Form correctly. In addition to answering some other questions, Luke also points out why he’s particularly interested in the concept of parti.

More detail on Luke’s interview. 

Web Standards for Web Apps with Molly Holzschlag

There are a number of new standards that have come out recently, HTML5 being perhaps the most notable for web applications, because it was brought forth with applications in mind. New features, like canvas, are designed to improve dynamic interactions between the presentation layer and the behavior layer. JavaScript’s usage has really matured and is almost indispensable with developers.

In this podcast, I reach out to my long time friend, Molly Holzschlag to discuss the impact these and other advancements are having on web application design and development, along with the tremendous benefits building with standards (or even a subset of them) brings to the lifecycle of a product.

Molly is the unsinkable author of a metric ton of web development books, is a noted teacher, and an in-demand consultant in the field. There’s likely no one better to ask about web standards than Molly.

More detail on Molly’s interview.

Roughing it with Interactive Prototypes with Richard Rutter and James Box

Without planning, web apps have no where to go. Planning documents for web app projects are often overlooked, despite their importance in the success of the product. As a designer, no matter how great your research is, or how amazing your programmers are, if your planning documents do not develop well, your project will fail.

James Box and Richard Rutter of Clearleft have been working on ways to plan highly interactive web apps that make the process more efficient.

Instead of using traditional deliverables, they show clients what they call ‘design tools.’ The advantage to these is that they stress design as a process, rather than set in stone. This method aids the flow of dialog between the designers and the client.

More details on Richard and James interview.

Information about Part 2

I think you’ll find great nuggets of information from all of these podcasts. Early next week, I’ll finish this series of podcasts with:

• Steve Mulder and Riccardo LaRosa on Web 2.0 Strategy & Design
• Dan Brown on Documenting Design 
• Robert Hoekman on Interaction Design with Frameworks 
• Brian Kalma on Company Culture Meets Customer Experience

CD Offer

If you enjoy listening to these podcasts you’ll want to check out the Web App Summit proceedings CD where you can hear the audio presentations from the Summit. For only $185, your CD will include 14 audio recordings and 22 presentation decks. Get more information on pricing and ordering the CD.  

Enjoy the podcasts.

Subscribe to our podcast via

This week I wanted to share my interview with Brian Kalma, Director of User Experience and Web Strategy for the darling of Internet retail, Zappos.com. In case you’ve somehow missed out on their meteoric rise to top of online retail, now conducting over a billion dollars in sales a year, then you’re in for a treat. I can’t think of a company with a more interesting case study in employee involvement and fanatical customer service. It’s really nice to see a company succeed for all the right reasons.

Zappos is a unique place. Every employee hired at their corporate headquarters in Las Vegas is required to go through the four-week customer loyalty (call-center training) course, including answering phones. So every employee has a strong grasp on the experience of their customers, from lawyers to VPs, managers to software developers.

You might be involved with a design team with a handful of designers or perhaps a large number of stake holders. Brian has a similar experience, with one notable exception. He regularly conducts web strategy meetings with an open invitation to the entire company. That’s more than 1,300 people! But design ideas are just the beginning. Employees are also encouraged to participate in other ways, from recording product videos, to being models on the site. In fact, all models on the site, which sells shoes, clothing, accessories, and more every day, are just regular employees.

On top of these duties, Brian also passionately supports Zappos’ social media outreach, where all employees are encouraged to look for comments about their company on places like Twitter and Facebook, and then actively engage with those customers, without oversight. For many companies, that would be a nightmare. Brian says it’s an amazing by-product of their dedication to their employees and their employees’ dedication to the customers. This is the basis of the Zappos culture, which Brian has to translate into content on their web site and use to drive sales.

And drive sales he has. 75% of their sales are from repeat customers, spending more than 2.5 times more in the following months than their initial purchase. And I asked Brian how he leverages their unique culture into their web presence to make these sales figures possible.

Tune into to the podcast for more details on the life of Brian at Zappos and their experience success stories.

[I should also mention that Brian is one of the expert speakers on our Web App Summit Proceedings disc, which we're now taking orders for. If you couldn't make it to the summit, this disc provides hundreds of pages of speaker materials, and 19 hours of presentation audio. Brian's 75-minute talk, Baking a Corporate Culture into the Online Experience is one of the 14 presentations included on the disc. The disc is a great source of information and inspiration for your work. Learn more about the Web App Summit Proceedings. You won't regret it!]

Last week’s UIE Web App Summit was the best Web App Summit we have ever put together. The 16 outstanding speakers covered topics ranging from form design, Ajax, RIAs, design deliverables, wireframes, accessibility, design patterns, and web standards.

Highlights of the Summit included two incredible keynote presentations. Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, inspired the attendees with an incredible talk on Building a Brand that Matters. And our own Jared Spool gave an insightful talk, Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon. Now you have the chance to hear what Tony, Jared, and 14 other presenters said at the Web App Summit with our Proceedings CD.

We take great care working with each speaker to design extremely valuable materials. As a result, with the proceedings, you’ll have all the tools and techniques needed to tackle your biggest design challenges. Plus, these proceedings allow you to share this knowledge with your colleagues. Not only do you get to read the presentation decks, you get to hear some of the actual presentations.

Learn from world-renown experts:

• Luke Wroblewski on Parti and the Design Sandwich
• Bill DeRouchey on Designing Humanity Back Into Your Products
• Nathan Curtis on Achieving Reuse with Patterns and Components
• Joshua Porter on Designing for First-time Users
• And many others

Overall, this CD has 22 presentations from 16 presenters. And 19 hours of audio recordings of the Featured Presentations, Keynotes, and Perspective Talks from Monday and Wednesday of the Summit.

Did you attend the Web App Summit? Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you have access to the updated presentations and the audio recordings.

If you didn’t attend, this is the best way to experience the valuable information shared by our presenters. You can see all the presentations on the CD at the  Web App Summit agenda. 

Order your CD by May 8 to be guaranteed the full set of notes and audio recordings, so you too can experience the Summit.

The Web App Summitis just over 4 weeks away. World-class speakers like Derek Featherstone, Luke Wroblewski, Molly Holzschlg, Robert Hoekman, and others will be attending and presenting on form design, Ajax, RIAs, design deliverables, wireframes, accessibility, design patterns, and web standards. Would you like to help us out? The Web App Summit is being held from April 19-22, 2009 in Newport Beach, CA at the Marriott Newport Beach Hotel & Spa. We are currently looking for volunteers who are available to assist us throughout the full four days of the conference and with the initial set-up on Saturday.

Volunteers will be asked to arrive around 1 pm on Saturday, April 18 and stay until the end of the Summit. Throughout the main four days of the conference, volunteers will be assigned to a full-day workshop and short talks to assist conference speakers with their needs. We’ll make every effort to accommodate your preference for which sessions you’d like to attend.

Volunteers are responsible for paying for all travel and hotel accommodations, but we will provide breakfast and lunch Sunday through Wednesday of the Summit. The registration fee is waived for volunteers. If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions, please send your replies directly to Lauren Cramer at lcramer@uie.com. Priority will be given to full-time students and those of you available to help out for the full event from Sunday, April 19 through Thursday, April 22, plus initial set-up on Saturday. 

To help you understand what you can expect out of this seminar, Hagan has put together a preview for you:

Don’t miss this presentation! Register with the promotion code STPADDY and get both our lowest rate of $99, and lifetime access to the recording of this talk at no additional cost. Share it with others in your organization to watch whenever they want, as often as they want.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. What challenges do you face with your web application’s navigation system? What advice can you pass along to others? Are you planning to be at the Web App Summit in Newport Beach this April? Share your thoughts below.

The client had hired us because they were concerned about checkout-process abandonment. Their analytics were showing a 13% drop off in sales, which, based on the average value of the abandoned shopping carts, was worth about $1.2 million a year in additional revenue.

Checkout-process abandonment is common in e-commerce sites and something that you can easily detect with your site’s usage logs. You just look at the number of people who get to the first screen and then the number of people who actually complete the transaction. Everyone who doesn’t make it is an abandonment.

When the team contacted us, they’d already pretty much decided what the problem was and how they were going to fix it, even though they had never watched any shoppers make purchases. And they were dead wrong. Not only was their fix not going to help, our research showed that it was going to increase abandonment.

Two weeks of usability testing on the live site (and on competitors’ sites), followed by two weeks of iterative paper prototype testing produced a streamlined checkout process, which, once implemented, showed a dramatic increase in revenues. It’s amazing what you’ll learn when you actually watch your users.

Today’s article, The $300 Million Button, talks about the bulk of that increase — how a simple change to a common screen produced $300,000,000 of additional revenue over the next year. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.

Improving forms, like a checkout process, can show immediate results in your design’s user experience. We’re fortunate that at this year’s UIE Web App Summit, we have Luke Wroblewski repeating last year’s top-rated Web Application Form Design full-day seminar. If your site has forms (and what site doesn’t these days), this is a must-take course!

Have you seen results from changes to your forms? We’d love to hear your experiences. Share them with us below.

Without the mind-meld thing, we have to resort to more primitive approaches to get everyone on the same page. In the past, we’ve tried templates, guidelines, and style guides. However, these have not proven to be very effective and end up frustrating teams more than helping the design process.

A few years back, we started seeing the emergence of pattern libraries as a solution to this problem. However, recently our research has shown us that pattern libraries only get you so far. For the rest of the solution, a component library can fill the gaps.

That’s why we’re thrilled that Nathan Curtis is presenting at this year’s Web App Summit, to help us navigate the pattern and component library world. And, for today’s UIEtips, he’s got a great article on Components Versus Patterns that explains the differences between the two (and why you may need both).

If you’re thinking a pattern or component library can help your team be more efficient and create better designs, then you’ll want to check out Nathan’s full-day seminar: Achieving Reuse with Patterns and Components. We’re excited about this brand new seminar and think it’s perfect for teams looking to get uniformity and increase development speed, without sacrificing creativity.

Have you considered using a pattern or component library for your project? What moves have you made in that direction? We want to hear you stories below.

I think the 2009 UIE Web App Summit (April 19-22, Newport Beach, CA) has one of the best line ups of speakers we’ve ever had. We’ve spent the past six months hand-crafting this excellent program that’s all about planning, designing, and building web-based applications. We’re very excited about it and you should be too.

In this podcast, Brian and I discuss the Summit program details. You’ll hear about all four days of the conference — the great topics and why we chose this set of experts. You’ll get a great overview of the sessions and see, first hand, why we think it’s so exciting.

We’d love to see you in Newport Beach, CA this April. Listen and let us know what you think.

We’re planning on launching the full site in January, but we wanted you to have a sneak peak at the great program we’ve put together. This year’s Summit is really exceptional and we think you’ll want to be there.

UIE Web App Summit 2009

At the UIE Web App Summit, you’ll meet the innovators and world-class designers behind today’s most successful web apps. 

We’ve carefully crafted this four-day Summit to include two days of intensive full-day workshops on form design, Ajax, RIAs, design deliverables, wireframes, accessibility, design patterns, and web standards. Our world-class presenters will be talking about:

* How to implement a Web 2.0 strategy and design
* Creating highly-effective design deliverables
* Using design patterns and components to achieve reuse
* How to create wireframes and prototype for Ajax

We round out the conference with two more days of featured presentations from world-renown experts, to give you fresh perspectives and new insights on today’s web app design challenges. 

Last year’s Summit attendees told us they returned to their teams empowered to make an immediate impact, all fired up and ready to go. You’ll come away inspired to create amazing applications that will delight your users.

Register by January 7 for a Limited-Edition Web App Summit iPod nano

By registering early, you’ll receive a very cool gift: the latest Apple iPod nano.

This limited-edition Web App Summit 2009 iPod nano can store 2,000 songs, 7,000 photos, or 8 hours of video on an internal 8GB hard drive. Plus, it will sport the slick Web App Summit 2009 logo on the back. 

We’re sending an iPod nano to every person who registers before January 7. This is not a raffle or drawing — by signing up you are guaranteed to receive your iPod nano.

We hope to see you in Newport Beach!

In this week’s SpoolCast, I had a chance to speak with Bill Scott. Bill has been one of my heroes for years, having really pushed the envelope as an evangelist for the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. He then went on to work on the Yahoo! Teachers project, where he took his knowledge of Ajax and Web 2.0 techniques and applied it to a creative solution for educators. Most recently, Bill has become the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix, where he now is driving how technology can enhance the user experience at one of the companies that understands what it takes.

During our conversation, we talked about some of the innovative techniques he’s using at Netflix, what he learned from the Yahoo! Teachers project, and his most recent work on Anti-patterns — learning from what we shouldn’t be doing.

I think you’ll enjoy this podcast. We look forward to your questions and thoughts. Let us know in the comments!

[Note: We had prepared this podcast to be released earlier this year, but due to schedule conflicts, its release was delayed. As a result, the intro mentions the very successful 2008 Web App Summit as if it's still to come. But don't worry: we'll have another one next year, so stay tuned!]

In this week’s article for our email newsletter, UIEtips, I share some of the challenges we’ve seen users encounter in our usability tests of web applications. These are challenges you’ll want to look out for when users interact with your applications. I hope you enjoy it.

You can read my article here.

At UIE, a big part of our research agenda focuses on how to create web applications that delight users. In the upcoming months, we’ll share our tips and techniques in our weekly Usability Tools podcast.

What are some of the challenges you’ve had to address when building web-based applications?

Duration: 22min | File size: 12.5 MB
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[ Text Transcript ]

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, we will be sitting down to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

In this week’s podcast, Brian Christiansen and I continue exploring usability techniques for web-based applications. Web-based applications are different from content-based web sites because the users are involved in a transaction. When we’re researching the usability of a content-based site, we’re focused on how users will find and react to the information. However, with web-based applications, there are many other considerations that we need to account for.

If you missed the first part of the show, you can listen to it here:
Usability Tools Podcast: Useful Web App Usability Techniques, Part 1

This week, we explore the usability technique toolbox, focusing on those methods that help us with web-based applications.

In this episode we start with the basic usability test, move onto variants, then talk about field studies. In each case, we explore the web-app specific advantages and talk about how we get the information we need to make informed design decisions.

We talked about several books in this episode:

• The Handbook of Usability Testing—by Jeff Rubin
• A Practical Guide to Usability Testing—by Ginny Reddish and Joe Dumas
• Paper Prototyping—by Carolyn Snyder

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? We love to create shows based on your questions. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics we discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

Would you like to help us out? Web App Summit 2008 is being held from March 26 – March 28, 2008 in Coronado, California at the Coronado Island Marriott Resort. We are currently looking for volunteers who are available to assist us throughout the full three days of the Summit and with initial set-up. Volunteers will be asked to arrive by 3pm on Tuesday, March 25th and stay until the end of the Summit.

Throughout the main three days of the Summit, volunteers will be assigned to a full-day workshop and short talks to assist Summit speakers with their needs. We’ll make every effort to accommodate your preference for which sessions you’d like to attend. Volunteers are responsible for paying for all travel and hotel accommodations but we will provide breakfast and lunch Wednesday through Friday of the Summit. The registration fee is waived for volunteers.

If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions, please send your replies directly to Ashley McKee at amckee@uie.com. Priority will be given to full-time students and those of you available to help out for the full event from Wednesday, March 26th through Friday, March 28th, plus initial set-up.

Mistake #13: Not Explaining If It’s The Username or Password They Got Wrong

Returning to an electronics site they hadn’t used since last holiday season, the user entered what they thought was their email address and password, but it didn’t work. The error message was a simple, “Invalid Login. Please Try Again.” Was the password wrong or did they register with a different email address? (After all, they have had several over the years.)

The user tried several different combinations of email addresses and passwords, but none worked. Eventually, they left the shopping cart with a $500 purchase. They went from a very excited customer to a very frustrated one in a matter of moments.

Several folks wrote to tell me I’d gotten this wrong — that, in fact, this is intentional to throw off hackers.

It’s true that if you give an error message helping users know which they’ve gotten wrong, you are also giving prospective hackers information that makes it easier to violate the security of the site.

However, I’m wondering if all sites need the same security rigor. A site where a hacker could get at personal information and steal your identity requires great security.

But, does every site have the same restrictions? For example, an online forum where I can talk about my interest in magic tricks doesn’t need the same rigorous security restrictions as my mortgage account at my bank.

There are those in the security world who suggest that any breach in security is a bad thing and therefore every possible breach should be rigorously protected. Yet, maybe there’s another approach where we can decide, based on the information and functions we’re protecting, to err on the side of an easier experience some of the time.

How do you communicate complex and interactive design ideas to the development team? To answer this question, I had a chance to speak with with D. Keith Robinson, the Creative Director of Blue Flavor, a premier design and development shop based in Seattle, Washington. In addition to being one of the design experts we turn to for guidance, Keith was formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Digital Web Magazine.

We had a great discussion regarding the “backstage” portion of web app design. I think Keith has some innovate ideas which will inspire your own projects. In our chat, we discussed:

• “Projects from hell”
• Where can communications break down when designing web apps?
• How do effective deliverables affect the success of a project?
• What’s involved in creating enhanced deliverables to improve communication and the interaction design process?

We’re excited to have Keith speaking at our UIE Web App Summit this coming March. Keith will be discussing his successful communications methods for highly interactive designs, especially those where the design elements can’t be captured with static images.

You can catch his talk, Making the Translation: Critical Web App Design Deliverables on day 3 of the UIE Web App Summit!

In a recent UIEtips article, I described eight common account sign-in mistakes that we see all the time in our usability tests. Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published my latest article that continues the list with 8 more design mistakes you’ll want to avoid. If you’re designing an account system, or already have one, this serves as a good start to assess how much you may be frustrating your users.

You can read my article here.

Account Sign-in is just one of the topics we’ll discuss at the Web App Summit, March 26-28, 2008, in San Diego, CA. You’ll want to reserve your seat today. Tuesday, January 15th is the last day for the $1,799 pricing.

Today’s podcast features a fascinating conversation I had with New York Times graphic journalists, Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes.

Andrew and Steve are part of the team responsible for taking data and raw information from the day’s news and turning it into highly interactive and informative online experiences.

For example, the team built the NYTimes Debate Analyzer, a tool to explore the presidential debates. Readers can see how frequently a specific term, such as “health care” or “iraq”, is mentioned by each candidate. They can scroll to a specific answer in the transcript and the video automatically plays that section, bringing an entire new way to experience the debates.

In this discussion, we also examined some of the NYTimes.com’s other amazing interactive graphics and multimedia applications, including:

• Paths to the Top of the Home Run Charts – An interactive chart showing how quickly record holders beat the MLB home run record
• Trailer Living, Then and Now – Explore how vacation trailers have changed over the years
• Exonerated, Freed, and What Happened Then – An multimedia exploration of 200 prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence

I think you’ll enjoy my conversation with Steve and Andrew. You’ll learn a great deal about the their journalistic techniques for building for successful interactive online experiences.

I’m also greatly anticipating their presentation this March at our Web App Summit in San Diego, California. They will present the talk, Engaging an Audience: Using Out-of-the-Box Thinking to Create Great Designs.

Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published my latest article talking about engaging experiences found in an unlikely place: a newspaper web site. Yet, this isn’t just any newspaper web site, it’s the New York Times. The engaging experiences are interactive calculators, maps, and data visualization tools.

I’ll admit it right up front: This article is probably the most difficult one I’ve had to write in a long time. Not because the subject matter was hard to come up with. Nor was it because I was at a loss for words.

No, the reason it was so difficult to write was because of the examples. They were just so much fun to play with. I’d bring one up to quickly note a detail and then I’d realize I’ve spent 30 minutes just playing with it.

In this week’s article, I explore some key principles that are the common thread in the NYTimes interactive graphics. Of course, I provide links to the examples, which you’ll really want to play with. You were warned!

You can read my article here.

I am extremely excited that we have two key members from the New York Times, Andrew DeVigal and Steve Duenes, joining us for the UIE Web App Summit in San Diego, CA on March 26-28. They are going to share their process and inspiration for their engaging interactive designs. You don’t want to miss this session.

Have you come up with some interesting methods of making your data engaging?

That’s exactly the situation that our friend and second-time Web App Summit presenter, Sean Kane, now finds himself in. Sean recently left Netflix to be the founder of a new company, GetListed, where he is constructing his UX team from the ground up.

At Netflix, Sean had resources most of us could only dream of: a top-notch team, a wealth of user data, and a management team that truly understands how UX can play an important role. Under his watch, the site grew 14-fold, so he knows what he’s doing.

Yet, as many of us know, there are challenges to being in a small organization with limited resources and only a sliver of real data about who the users will be. So, we’re watching closely as Sean brings his talents, skills, and experience to his new venture.

In this issue of UIEtips, Sean shares with us his initial efforts to bootstrapping his user experience team. He talks about how he’s building the GetListed team and his initial strategy for creating a world-class design, much like he did at Netflix.

Read today’s article.

Have you assessed your team’s capabilities? What techniques have you used? Are there skills you think are important that aren’t on the list? We’d love to hear from you. Leave your thoughts below.

[Sean will be updating us on his adventure at the Web App Summit 2008, in San Diego, CA, March 26-28. We've already started to fill up, but there's a few seats left. You'll want to register soon because this event will sell out.You can see the entire program, and find out how to get your free limited-edition red iPod nano by registering by December 18th, by visiting the the Summit site.]

The question has turned into a bit of a conundrum, with the answer being yes and the answer being no. While good design practice is good design practice and it applies no matter what you’re designing, you need to know who your users are, what they are trying to do, and how they expect to do it. You need to watch the users work with the designs you create, so you can learn where the designs are working for them and where they are failing.

However, designing for web apps is different than just designing a web site. It lives in a browser, it has complicated activities and edge conditions, and little things can have big implications, especially when they go awry. You need to know different things when designing for web apps than when designing for any other type of interaction.

In today’s UIEtips, we’re reprinting an article I wrote last year detailing five of the greatest usability challenges that web-app designers face. The problems and constraints designers are still dealing with today make this article just as pertinent as ever.

Read today’s article.

What challenges have you faced when developing web-based applications? How have you overcome these? We’d love to hear from you. Leave your thoughts below.

[Overcoming the challenges of web-based applications is just part of what we'll be talking about at the upcoming Web App Summit, March 26-28, 2008 in San Diego, CA. You can be part of that event and receive your limited edition Web App Summit iPod nano by registering before 12/11. More details here.]

We’re holding the Summit in beautiful Coronado, CA on March 26 – 28, 2008. We’ve got a great line-up of presenters, including Andrew DeVigal, Steve Duenes, Derek Featherstone, Kim Goodwin, Sean Kane, Jeremy Keith, Steve Mulder, Leisa Reichelt, D. Keith Robinson, Bill Scott, Luke Wroblewski, and Indi Young. Jared Spool will also be presenting UIE’s latest research on web app design.

Last year, we were amazed at how well this event was received, and this year is already shaping up to be even better.

It could be because of the full-day workshops covering the most critical topics surrounding web apps for your success, or the 90-minute short talks covering the essentials for designing successful web apps and the best practices for implementing successful web apps. It could be because the caliber of attendees we attract are the best and the brightest. Or it could be because we’re giving everyone who signs up before December 11th a brand new, limited edition Web App Summit 2008 iPod nano.

Of course, I know you want to come to the Summit (and get your own iPod nano). Everything you need to register is at the Summit site. Don’t delay — there might not be seats available.

At first glance, eBay is a very simple site: sellers post products and buyers bid on them. A little application originally built to sell PEZ dispensers, eBay is elegant in how simple it all seems to work. But dig a little deeper and it becomes clear how incredible the eBay system really is.

A series of tightly coupled web-based applications, eBay provides a system that can handle selling practically any object, from office supplies to automobiles, from computer equipment to software companies. It would be difficult to find a site that completes the same amount of business per minute as eBay. A change that results in a minor dip in sales could equate to huge monetary losses. Given these challenges, how does eBay approach their design decisions?

Enter Christian Rohrer, Director of User Experience Research at eBay. In this presentation from January’s UIE Web App Summit, Christian provides a peek behind the curtain at eBay’s User Experience (UX) process. In this information-packed talk, Christian discusses:

» The unique challenges of creating a successful user experience with a sophisticated application like eBay
» The UX team’s key role in eBay’s overall business strategy
» The evolution of several eBay UI elements based on solid user research and key business levers
» eBay’s focus on ROI to justify design decisions
» The rationale behind the redesign of areas of eBay.com, including the site pagination and registration process

[ Producer's Note: The recording begins a couple of minutes after Christian started his presentation. Despite this small technical issue, we believe this content is far too valuable for you to miss. I think you'll agree. We also expect to post a transcript of Christian's talk in the next few days. Stay tuned! ]

Pabini details her experience during each day of the conference, and provides pictures, quotes, and sample slides from our presenters to highlight her points.

Thanks, Pabini!

[Photo courtesy of Ron Yoder for UIE]

At my gym, you can tell it’s the New Year. The parking lot is full and the treadmills are going strong. Everyone is resolved to get into better shape, especially after all the “shape-enhancing” meals they enjoyed over the holidays. Traditionally, this only lasts until mid-February, when their loved one pronounces, “I love you just the way you are,” and the need for radical exercise and diet dissipates for all but the most dedicated to the cause.

Here at UIE, we’ve made some resolutions too. With the success of our UIE Virtual Seminar series (more than 6,000 people have participated in last year’s seminars), we plan to bring an even better program this year, with an improved experience.

In 2007, you’ll see more reports in our very popular Designer’s Guide to Web Applications series, along with a couple of new series we’re very excited about. I can’t tell you too much about them, but I know these will be essential additions to your group’s library.

We also have great plans to build up the publicly available content on our web site. Our Brain Sparks blog continues to grow, being a great place to discuss the latest thinking in experience design. The Articles library contains a wealth of knowledge not found anywhere else.

And, you’ll hear new audio recordings from our conferences and summits, and our newest podcast, The Josh and Jared Show, where Josh Porter and I discuss interesting UX happenings. You can listen to the audio recordings here.

If you’re looking for your own resolution, you’ll enjoy today’s UIEtips article, where I discuss the fine art of touring web sites for good design ideas. There’s a gold mine of inspiration out there, waiting for us to explore.

Hagan Rivers, our favorite expert on web app design, has done her own touring and produced a wonderful report, The Designer’s Guide to Web Applications, Part II: Web App Tour 2007. In this beautifully illustrated report, Hagan describes some very interesting aspects of Salesforce.com, Serenata Flowers, 37 Signal’s Backpack, and others. You can get more information on the report here.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

What sites have you toured? Did you find anything interesting? Were you able to overcome your design challenges by seeing how others tackled the same problems? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Leave a comment and join the discussion below.

[If you find this article interesting, I encourage you to join us in Monterey, California this January for our UIE Web App Summit. I will be presenting the Summit Keynote: Moving Towards Delight: Following the Rapid Evolution of Web-Based Applications. I will predict where web applications are going by looking at where they have been. You don't want to miss out. See the Summit website for more details.]

The original plan had been to create an online game. But they were just about out of money. And then Butterfield had this crazy vision of building a photo-sharing website, and before you knew it Flickr was a cultural phenomenon.

…

Butterfield: In February 2004, we launched Flickr.

Fake: George Oates [a Flickr employee] and I would spend 24 hours, seven days a week, greeting every single person who came to the site. We introduced them to people, we chatted with them. This is a social product. People are putting things they love–photographs of their whole lives–into it. All of these people are your potential evangelists. You need to show those people love.

We did all kinds of dumb, stupid things. But our unofficial slogan was, “F— up fast.” Make mistakes rapidly, learn from them, and move past them.

(Note: You can meet Stewart Butterfield at the upcoming UIE Web App Summit in Monterey, CA on January 21-23. He’ll be talking about Flickr’s experience with building web-based applications, along with Sean Kane from Netflix, Jim Whitney from Whiteboard Labs, Christian Rohr from eBay, and many others. If you develop web apps, you don’t want to miss this event. There are a few seats still available.)

I never review things online. Except at Netflix. And that’s because it’s a no-brainer. An email shows up each time I return a movie. Just one click and it’s rated. These empowered emails may seem like a small thing but it’s a sign of the way Netflix works.

You’ll have a chance to meet Sean Kane, one of the Netflix braintrust behind their awesome experience, at the upcoming UIE Web App Summit in Monterey, CA. Sean is probably the sweetest guy on the planet and gets all excited when you start talking about the things that make Netflix work (and justifiably so). Make sure you stop by and talk to him when you’re there.

(We’re close to selling out, but still have a few seats left, so you’ll want to register right away, if you haven’t already.)

Originally recorded at the User Interface 11 Conference, recorded in Cambridge Massachusetts on October 10 2006.

There’s been a lot of talk about Rich Internet Applications (RIA) over the last few years. When the topic was first raised through the release of Flash MX’s change in focus from an interactive animation development studio, to an application development environment, there was an early conversation about trying to define what a rich internet application is. Then as other players tried to enter the field a bit more ferociously, the conversation has turned towards how to make rich internet applications. Not in terms of design, but rather in terms of technology. Little care has been given to the more sensitive topic of what and why.

In this presentation, David Malouf moves beyond the usual story of patterns, code, and tips and tricks, and talk more about aesthetics, experience design, brand, and total environmental context of use. He layers those elements over a discussion around trying to define “richness” in the context of general application design and then try to apply it to a continuum of various types of computer and network based solutions.

David Malouf is a passionate spokesperson for the discipline of Interaction Design. He founded the Interaction Design Association and became its first Vice President, with a keen eye towards evangelizing interaction design in the areas of practice, research, and education.

David is now a Senior User Experience Designer at Symbol Technologies, where he designs a wide array of complex system applications as well as software to run on various types of handheld devices. (At the time of this recording, he was still working at Interlinks, doing similar work.) Over the last 7 years David has designed RIAs ranging from e-commerce sites to enterprise software platforms utilizing a range of technologies including, Java, .NET, Flash, and AJAX.

If you found this presentation interesting, I encourage you to join David live in Monterey, California this January at our UIE Web App Summit. David will co-present, along with Bill Scott from Yahoo, their full-day workshop, Designing Powerful Web Applications using AJAX and RIAs. This workshop was a hit at the UI 11 conference and we expect it to sell out quickly.

(If you’d like to get all of the Brain Sparks Audio Library in iTunes, just paste this link into the Subscribe to Podcast feature.)

Writing on Digital Web, Luke points out that the two have a lot in common:

“In a self-service retail world (present in most physical stores and just about everywhere online), the back-of-pack information plays the role of surrogate sales associate. It outlines the advantages of a product and often includes explanations of how to best utilize them. In other words, it tries to finalize the sale with peripheral messaging that supports the front’s central message.

In many web applications, this role is filled by product tours. The most common product tour is an illustrated page or set of pages that explains what can be done with an application, and shows features in action through representative screen shots.”

Lots more in the article itself: Packaging Design for Web-based Products

Whenever I’m in an unfamiliar city, I always ask someone at the hotel, the bellhop, doorperson, or receptionist, what their favorite restaurants are. In my experience, this is a foolproof way to find the best restaurants. Instead of going online and searching for some place, or looking in the phonebook, I ask somebody. I don’t want just any old answer. I want a recommendation.

Instead of spending hours sifting through a myriad of data, people look for recommendations in order to save time and frustration while researching a certain product, place, or service. How many times have you been asked what you think of your car, a vacation spot, or cell phone provider? Valuable, and more often than not, reliable information is only one question or click away.

Recommendation systems are becoming an extremely important business and marketing tool for many web sites. These systems use sophisticated algorithms to record user behavior, find correlations among the data, and produce recommendations based on them. What better way to entice a user than to predict their tastes and preferences? Netflix, who rents two-thirds of their movies through recommendations, has even gone so far as to offer a $1 million prize to anyone who can improve the current version of their system by 10 percent.

In this issue of UIEtips, Josh Porter dives into the fast-emerging world of recommendation systems. You’ll discover what Josh thinks are the most important benefits of these systems, what their serious drawbacks are, and where recommendation systems will be going in the future.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

What recommendation systems have you encountered? Have you been delighted, offended, surprised, or unfazed by the recommendations you received? Let us know what you think. Leave us a comment and join the discussion below.

[If you find this article interesting, I encourage you to join us in Monterey, California this January for our UIE Web App Summit. Josh will present his short-talk, Learning from Social Web Applications, and Rashmi Sinha of Uzanto will be presenting Design Strategies for Web-based Recommender Systems. You don't want to miss out. See the summit website for more details.]

The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users’ goals and activities. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don’t, every little design decision becomes a struggle.

To help designers deliver software and web apps that successfully satisfy their users’ needs, we turned to Larry Constantine, author of
Software for Use, to share some of his insights on the subject. In this week’s UIEtips, Larry has written an excellent article describing activity modeling and usage-centered application design. Larry discusses how designers can satisfy their users’ needs by focusing on the activities users are trying to accomplish.

I’ve known Larry Constantine for more than 15 years. Larry is a recognized leader in design methodology and product usability. With Lucy Lockwood, he developed Usage-Centered Design, a model-driven process with a proven track record for delivering software and web applications that fit the genuine needs of users.

Like me, Larry comes from a computer engineering and project management background. He’s always approached design from the standpoint of what can realistically be done by teams, which makes his usage-centered approach practical and extremely successful.

It’s also no accident that we’ve chosen to include Larry’s tutorial on Usage-Centered Design at our upcoming UIE Web App Summit this January. If you’re thinking your team could benefit from this proven process, I highly recommend you consider coming to the tutorial.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

What type of information do you gather from your users? What are your thoughts on activity modeling and usage-centered design? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Recently, I’ve been playing with a new feature of Google.com: Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Trying these out is a must-do activity for any interface designer.

At first glance, they look just like any other word processor or spreadsheet. However, that’s what makes them impressive. They are implemented completely in a browser, using only standard HTML and Javascript.

The line between what we do on the web and what we do at our desk has significantly blurred. This presents opportunities for application developers that were previously unthinkable.

Yet, it also presents challenges and puzzles to solve. We need to learn an entirely new interaction style, with new constraints and new boundary conditions. (For example, how do you make accessible AJAX work?)

Two people who are at the head of this curve are Bill Scott and David Malouf. Bill is Yahoo!’s local AJAX evangelist and David has been a major player in the founding of the Interaction Design Association. Both have been at the forefront of this new wave of interaction design.

Josh Porter and I recently had a chance to talk with Bill and David about some of the challenges and changes that are happening in the interaction design space. We were supposed to talk for only a few moments, but the discussion was so fascinating, we kept talking for almost an hour.

In this issue of UIEtips, we’ve put together some of the best parts of that discussion. You’ll read what David and Bill think about choosing AJAX versus Flash, what’s a good starting point for learning these technologies, and how design patterns can help with the development process. I’m sure you’ll find it as fascinating as I did.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Have you been experimenting with RIAs and AJAX? Is this an area you’re thinking of moving to? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Leave a comment and join the discussion below.

[If you find this article interesting, I encourage you to join us in Monterey, California this January for our UIE Web App Summit. David and Bill will present their acclaimed full-day seminar, Designing Powerful Web Applications using AJAX and RIAs, as well as give their own short talks. You don't want to miss out. See the summit website for more details.]

In this interview, my colleague Joshua Porter and I talk with David Malouf, Senior User Experience Designer at Symbol Technologies, and Bill Scott, Ajax Evangelist and Design Manager for Yahoo’s recently released Design Pattern Library. We discuss Rich Internet Application development, Ajax, and other important issues surrounding the creation of sophisticated web apps.

David and Bill will be teaching their one-day workshop, Designing Powerful Web Applications with AJAX and RIAs at the upcoming UIE Web App Summit in Monterey, CA in January. Their workshop was a big hit at the UI11 conference and I’m expecting it will sell out at the Summit.

(If you’d like to get all of the Brain Sparks Audio Library in iTunes, just paste this link into the Subscribe to Podcast feature.)

Still, when we use today’s web apps, there is a clear distinction between online and off. If we aren’t online, we simply can’t use them. Our data resides on a web server (not our own machine) and the only way to access it is to actually communicate with the server in real time. To do that, we must be online.

Things are changing, however, albeit slowly. David Malouf, who is co-presenting a full-day seminar: Designing Powerful Web Applications using AJAX and RIAs at our upcoming Web App Summit, pointed me to a recent demonstration of a web app that promises to let us do just that: have our cake and eat it, too.

The application is a web-based office product called Zimbra. It includes a web-based email client, just like we’re used to with Yahoo Mail, Gmail, or Hotmail, but it also gives you the ability to work offline. From a recent blog post demonstrating that ability:

“The design goal is to have the same user experience with Zimbra both online and offline. Technically the Zimbra Offline client is the same AJAX client UI but now connecting to a local sync’d cache of the data and more importantly the ability to search, tag, organize, etc without network access. The two way sync of mail, calendar, contacts, and documents will allow Zimbra user’s to take their collaboration data together with the Zimbra AJAX experience with them on the road or in places without a network connection and when they come back online – all of the changes made while offline (like composing, deleting, moving, creating messages, contacts, events or folders) are sync’d back to the cloud. Just like traditional offline mail clients – messages pending to be sent are stored in an Outbox where you can edit and view them until re-connected.”

That’s quite a design goal, to make the online/offline distinction disappear! But it’s a vision of the future, (and I’m going out on a limb on this one ) this will certainly be a feature built into many more web apps in months to come.

Usually, we’re not like this. We don’t get too excited about the new technologies that are introduced. After all, we never really got excited about mobile computing. Or, ubiquitous technology. Or, speech technology. Or, rich media. Or, tablet computers. None of these things excited us enough to really pay attention. When clients would come to us and say, “What are you thinking about designing for handhelds?”, we’d just say, “That’s not our area of expertise. We haven’t looked at it yet.”

NASA’s a client and they have a saying about the technology they use: “It has to be old enough for the Space Program.” NASA likes proven technology for their spaceships and I guess we’re very similar. We don’t like to look at something until it’s been around and proven to be something more than hype or a fad.

So, why did we get excited about Web 2.0? The thing that excites us the most is what people are doing with it. We’re seeing interesting new applications appearing out of nowhere, all because of this new platform and its capabilities.

I think it makes sense for designers to really understand what Web 2.0 is and what it could mean for them. That’s why in this week’s UIEtips we’re re-printing an article I wrote last year, where I discuss the power of API’s, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking. I hope you enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Have you looked at the Web 2.0 platform yet? Do your applications take advantage of APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking? Does it intrigue you? Scare you? Bore you? I’d really be interested in your thoughts. Leave a comment and join the discussion below.

[If you find this article interesting, I encourage you to join us in Monterey, California this January for our UIE Web App Summit. On Day 3 of the event, we'll explore the important innovations from the Web 2.0 phenomena. We've invited the experts behind these approaches to give you insights into how to integrate them into your design. You don't want to miss out. See the summit website for more details.]

Designing with Patterns

We’re lucky to have Bill speaking at our upcoming Web App Summit this January in Monterey, CA. He knows a tremendous amount about both creating and disseminating patterns, and his full-day tutorial with David Malouf contains an in-depth discussion about them.

Here’s a snippet from the article about how patterns play a dual role for teams:

“Patterns really act both as a design vocabulary and as a way to capture emergent best practices within the context of a specific design problem. With the recent advent of AJAX and the resurgence of Flash within the page, there are a number of new (and old) idioms that are now appearing on the web. As these idioms emerge, it’s handy to have a common terminology across Yahoo! for referring to them.”

The legend of how eBay got started is a quaint one: Pierre Omidyar created eBay so that his wife could buy and sell her favorite collectibles: Pez Dispensers. The story has been told thousands of times, and most people like to think that the site is a labor of love. Unfortunately, the story turns out to be a little bending of the truth: apparently Omidyar realized the site’s potential before pursuing it.

It is true, however, that Omidyar used the site to help sell his wife’s collectibles. He was one of the first users, as well as the first developer, of eBay. That may sound like an unusual combination: to be both the user and the developer. Our conceptions of both tend to be very different. Users are those people who use stuff. Developers are those who build it.

But what happens when they’re one in the same? What happens when the user is the developer, and vice versa? It turns out to be a powerful combination that leads to unseen advantages that those building for others don’t have (and might not be able to duplicate).

Scratching Your Own Itch

The web application Basecamp was created by a team of web developers at 37signals who had a project management problem.

“Basecamp originated in a problem: As a design firm we needed a simple way to communicate with our clients about projects. We started out doing this via client extranets which we would update manually. But changing the html by hand every time a project needed to be updated just wasn’t working. These project sites always seemed to go stale and eventually were abandoned. It was frustrating because it left us disorganized and left clients in the dark.”

“So we started looking at other options. Yet every tool we found either 1) didn’t do what we needed or 2) was bloated with features we didn’t need — like billing, strict access controls, charts, graphs, etc. We knew there had to be a better way so we decided to build our own.”

Other People Have the Itch, Too

What happens next is the same: after you scratch your own itch someone realizes that others have the itch, too. It might be the developer who notices, or another user. Mike McDerment, who co-founded Freshbooks, a web-based accounting application, describes this:

“(We) founded the company in January 2003. We were doing web design and development projects for various clients. We built FreshBooks for ourselves and very quickly realized that other businesses needed a painless billing solution. We put our heads down and got to work.”

Eating Your Own Dogfood

After you realize that others have the same problem, the next step isn’t to start building for all of those other people and assume you know everything. No, it’s to continue to design for yourself, and then use the product for an extended period of time. Play with it, push it, pull it, make sure that the features there are the right ones, not the nice-to-haves.

Christina Wodtke (who spoke at our User Interface 9 Conference), is working on a new web app: Public Square. She’s testing it out in a small way before releasing it as a service, using it to run one of our favorite sites, the online magazine Boxes and Arrows. She’s effectively killing two birds with one stone…using it herself as well as testing it with others to get real feedback.

Increased Passion for the Work

This users-as-developers cycle may be more virtuous than others. Dan Cederholm, who co-built a wine-sharing site called Corkd, describes how much more passionate he is when working on his own project.

“There’s a real difference between being a hired hand on a project for a specific amount of time and someone who has ownership as well as passion for what they’re working on (ownership and passion can be exclusive as well, but combined, they pack quite a punch). The short-term, part-time attention of a freelance designer or developer can often lead to clunky, duct-taped solutions after the contract is over and the site is actually being used by real people. Cork’d has been the complete opposite situation, where we’ve been able to launch a product that would be considered “done” under most circumstances and then react to member feedback using the same attention to detail that went into the initial construction.”

A New Model

At first, it can be quaint to say that building for yourself is a nice perk of your situation. Increasingly, however, starting with eBay and now with firms like these four (and countless others as well), this new model is becoming the de facto way to develop, a critical part of success. If you compare a piece of software created by its users vs. one that’s not, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference. The designers understand the problem better, they’ve worked through most of the issues, and they’re more passionate about it after all is said and done.

You may have seen one of my recent presentations where I talk about the failure of Blockbuster to win at the home-delivered DVD game. In this presentation, I’ll often take a show of hands, first asking people if they participate in Blockbuster’s program, then asking them if they participate in Netflix’s program. Usually, I get only one or two people, if any, who say they participate in Blockbuster’s program. (In contrast, almost everyone raises hands for Netflix.)

Recently, I was stunned at one presentation when several dozen people said they subscribed to Blockbuster. I was even more surprised because
of where I was at the time: in the main auditorium of Netflix’s corporate headquarters addressing a hundred of their designers and developers.

Josh Porter and I were on a swing through Silicon Valley when we had a chance to visit Netflix in their new headquarters. As soon as you pull in the driveway, you can tell these people really like their movies.

The building has an old So-Cal movie studio motif and the front lobby feels like you’re walking on celluloid. They’ve named every conference room after a film, complete with etched imagery in the glass. (The larger-than-life image of Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the window of the Rocky Horror Picture Show room is astonishing.) Even the bathrooms are named for film personalities (the first floor as Fred and Ginger; the second floor has Boris and Natasha).

I think this speaks to Netflix’s success. These folks live and breathe movies. They start many of their staff meetings with a discussion of movies.

However, they don’t just subscribe to their own service, which they get free. Many also subscribe to their competitor’s service.

The folks at Netflix really understand what it takes to make a culture that supports successful experience design. We were quick to notice the quality of the people they’ve assembled on their team and the culture they’ve built to create a great design.

All of that has paid off. Netflix is a darling of the high-tech world, showing how, in less than a decade, you can create a new type of business and beat the established, entrenched players. (Netflix is now twice the market cap of Blockbuster, having regularly shown a profit while Blockbuster regularly shows losses.)

For today’s UIEtips, Josh Porter describes one aspect of Netflix’s culture responsible for their success: Fast iterations. Because they are constantly trying new ideas, they can quickly outmaneuver their competition and stay ahead of the game.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Is your culture accepting of iterating quickly? Do you face obstacles getting designs in front of users rapidly? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave a comment and join the discussion below.

[Overcoming the challenges of web-based applications is exactly why we've put together the UIE Web App Summit, in Monterey, CA on January 21-23, 2007. We've assembled an amazing team of speakers, all of whom have overcome some significant challenges in some very creative ways. You don't want to miss out. See the summit website for more details.]

Earlier this month, the New York Times Technology Writer, David Pogue, wrote a fine little review of Apple’s iPod Shuffle:

I won’t kid you: I really dig this little thing. The entire back panel is a clip with exactly the right degree of hold for clipping to your clothing. The Shuffle feels great in your hand, and is capable of pumping out prodigious amounts of sound. I think it sounds spectacular (insert standard protest from audiophiles who resent all forms of music compression here).

and

You still have a day to register to get one of these included with your UIE Web App Summit registration. The special offer ends at the end of Tuesday, November 14. Conference details and registration information is here.

It seems like yesterday, but I first met Hagan Rivers ten years ago, in Vancouver, BC at the annual SIGCHI Conference. (She was Hagan Heller then, but the same bubbly personality she is today.) We were both tutorial instructors for that program and she (and a colleague from Apple) had put together an amazing session, comparing the construction techniques of dozens of web sites. She’d attracted a huge audience who, like me, thought the session had rocked.

At the time, Hagan was working for Netscape. Web-based applications of any complexity were rare — most of the sites of the time were information repositories with the occasional shopping cart and checkout application. So, she focused her interests in juxtaposing one design alternative against another, looking at how real sites tackled real problems.

This was a huge influence in our work at UIE, as we were just starting to look at the web at that time. It was shortly after hearing Hagan’s presentation that we started doing usability tests of different sites, looking for behavioral patterns and spawning most of the research efforts you see from us today.

Since then, Hagan married her tutorial co-instructor, David Rivers, started a family, and founded Two Rivers Consulting. She’s kept her interest in web design, but has focused primarily on web-based applications. Now, she’s using her keen eye to collect and contrast the different design alternatives for web apps.

Hagan is a walking encyclopedia of web app design ideas. We were lucky enough to convince her to start putting some of her thoughts in report form, the first of which we’ve just released: The Designer’s Guide to Web Applications, Part I: Structure and Flows. This is the first of many reports you can expect from Hagan over the next few months, each one looking at a different aspect of web app design, tapping into her incredible knowledge and insight. These will be must-have reports for anyone creating applications over the internet.

Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Hagan about her first report. It was a fun discussion, talking about how she’s come up with the concepts in the report, such as hubs, interviews, and her technique for diagramming the structure of web apps. We recorded the conversation and created a transcript. Both are now available at the UIE Brain Sparks Audio Library.

For today’s UIEtips, we have the transcription of my discussion with Hagan. To keep true to the original discussion, we’ve only made minor edits

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Are you having problems with the structural design of your web application? Have you come up with a way to diagram the elements of your web application? Share your thoughts and experiences with us and join the conversation in the comments below.

[Overcoming the challenges of web-based applications is exactly why we've put together the UIE Web App Summit, in Monterey, CA on January 21-23, 2007. We've assembled an amazing team of speakers, all of whom have overcome some significant challenges in some very creative ways. You don't want to miss out. See the summit website for more details.]

For years, we’ve been touring the world talking about designing web sites. At every presentation we’ve given, someone approaches us and asks the tough question: “Does this apply to web-based applications?”

It’s a tough question because the answer is Yes and it is No. Yes, good design practice is good design practice and it applies no matter what you’re designing. You need to know who your users are, what they are trying to do, and how they expect to do it. You need to watch the users work with the designs you create, so you can learn where the
designs are working for them and where they are failing.

But, No. Designing for web apps is a different type of animal. It lives in a browser, it has complicated activities and edge conditions, and little things can have big implications, especially when they go awry. You need to know different things when designing for web apps than when designing for any other type of interaction.

Then again, that’s what makes design fun. Understanding the problem and fitting them into the constraints is the fun part of design.

In today’s UIEtips, I talk about five usability challenges that web-app designers face. While these are not unique to web apps, designers will find themselves dealing with problems and constraints they’ll rarely see other places.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

What challenges have you faced when developing web-based applications? How have you overcome these? We’d love to know. Share your thoughts with us and join the conversation in the comments below.

[Overcoming the challenges of web-based applications is exactly why we've put together the UIE Web App Summit, in Monterey, CA on January 21-23, 2007. We've assembled an amazing team of speakers, all of whom have overcome some significant challenges in some very creative ways. You don't want to miss out. See the summit website for more details.]

Would you like to join us? The UIE Web App Summit is being held from January 21 – January 23, 2007 in Monterey, California at the Monterey Marriott Hotel. We are currently looking for volunteers who are available to assist us throughout the full three days of the summit. Volunteers will be asked to arrive by 3pm on Saturday, January 20th and stay until the end of the summit.

Throughout the main three days of the summit, volunteers will be assigned to full-day seminars and short talks to assist summit speakers with their needs. We’ll make every effort to accommodate your preference for which sessions you’d like to attend. Volunteers are responsible for paying for all travel and hotel accommodations but we will provide breakfast and lunch Sunday through Tuesday of the summit. The registration fee is waived for volunteers.

If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions, please send your replies directly to Ashley McKee at amckee@uie.com. Priority will be given to full-time students and those of you available to help out for the full event from Sunday, January 21st through Tuesday, January 23rd.

In our current research at UIE, we frequently observe the ongoing debate between usability and visual design. Can an application become more usable just by changing its aesthetics? Do we really need to know the underlying code of an application? There is increasing pressure to make web applications more functional, while at the same time to make those web applications pleasing to the eye.

Our research has shown that the most successful teams all have something in common: they effectively communicate with each other. The key for team members to successfully communicate is to have a solid understanding of the fundamentals. Developers need to understand the essentials of graphic design, and designers need to understand the inner workings of web applications.

When everyone on the team understands the basic principles of graphic design, the importance of visual organization and visual hierarchy becomes apparent. Both play huge roles in attracting users to web sites, not to mention maintaining their interest. The interface of a web application is the first thing a user experiences, making its design critical to success.

In today’s UIEtips, we are reprinting a fascinating article written by Luke Wroblewski back in 2003. Luke is the principal of LukeW Interface Designs as well as a principal designer for Yahoo! He also recently spoke at UI11, where he received rave reviews. In this article, Luke discusses how the arrangement of visual elements in a web application can coerce users to evaluate the content and interactions you want them to see most.

If you would like to learn more about visual design, you can catch Luke Wroblewski at the UIE Web App Summit. Luke will present Best Practices for Form Design: Bridging the Gap with Your Customers, a comprehensive look at how web form design can influence user behavior on your web site. Luke will also explain how a well-structured visual hierarchy can steer users in the direction you want them to take on your web page in Web Application Page Hierarchy. I highly suggest you check them out.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Are you struggling with the visual design of your web applications? Have you found a visual design that successfully communicates with your users? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Share your thoughts with us and join the conversation in the comments below.

[If you're working on web applications, you really want to sign up for the UIE Web App Summit we're holding in Monterey, CA this January. At this 3-day event, you'll meet the pioneers and world-class designers behind today's successful web applications. For more information about the summit, see the summit website.]

In our work, we’ve seen an increasing demand for complex web applications that provide users with a seamless and interactive experience. As a result, development teams are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of HTML and are turning to new development tools, including Flash and Ajax.

Flash has stood out over the years as a way to create applications with sophisticated capabilities beyond what is possible with today’s HTML. We first saw Flash’s potential in the web application space when we studied iHotelier, a Flash-based hotel reservation system.

It has been over 5 years since iHotelier’s Flash-based OneScreen application launched on the Broadmoor’s web site. Since then, it has been adopted by more than 3000 hotels around the world and has processed nearly one million reservations totaling about $350 million. As one of the first Rich Internet Applications doing e-commerce, OneScreen helped demonstrate a new generation of web applications that behave more like desktop applications and abandon the old request-reply model of the first generation of web applications.

In this week’s UIEtips, we reprinted an excellent article written by UIE’s Christine Perfetti. In this article, Christine discusses Flash’s potential for creating sleek, sophisticated, and interactive web applications, using iHotelier as a real-world example. I find the issues presented in the article still prevalent today, and believe you will too.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Are you continually frustrated by developing HTML-based applications? Have you found significant advantages to using Flash? Bring your struggles and triumphs to light by sharing your experiences with us. Join the conversation below.

[If you would like to learn more about the power of Flash, you'll really want to come hear Jim Whitney of Whiteboard Labs, at the UIE Web Application Summit this January. Jim is the designer of the original OneScreen user interface for the Broadmoor. At the Summit, he will discuss what he and his team learned from the experiences of OneScreen and other Rich Internet Applications over the past five years. (You can find out more about Jim, along with the other top speakers we've invited on the UIE Web Application Summit site.]