Read on for my favorite change.

In Firefox 2, after you typed your username and password into a site, a Firefox pop-up dialogue box appears asking if you’d like to save the password for next time. You can choose “Yes”, “Never for this site”, or “Not Now”. The web page won’t load unless you respond to the pop-up. Since I am hardly ever sure if I used the right password, I usually choose “Not Now”, so that I won’t accidentally save the wrong password.

Firefox 3 asks you the same question, except instead of an obtrusive pop-up, it uses an attractive drop-down dialogue bar right under the menu bar. The page continues to load even if you don’t respond Why is this so great? Now I can wait to see if the site accepted my password. Once I see that I used the right password, I click “Yes”. Firefox will no longer save an accidentally mistyped password!

A small change, but much more usable!

P.S. I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been helping shoot a movie (!), have been trying to reorganize my office at work, just got a tablet PC (it’s used, but it’s awesome!), been moving a lot of furniture into my apartment, and I’ve adopted a new exercise regimen.)

Why didn’t they tell her as soon as it happened? Why did the customer have to take action?

Eventually, April comes around and they STILL don’t have their album! No contact from the publisher.

Guess what you’ve got there? An irate customer. A customer that wonders why a CD was being packaged and shipped to Italy instead of sending the files online or printing them in the USA. A customer who lost faith in your competence and then in your integrity.

No updates. No apologies. They could have sent flowers or a partial refund…any pleasant contact is better than no contact.

Do you think she recommended the company to anyone or did she tell people to never use the company? Bad experiences are sticky.

Turn a Sticky Experience into Something Good
There have been times when a company has a made a mistake and the attention and sympathy I received made me happy to recommend the business to other people.

This goes for designers too. Let your clients know upfront exactly what you are going to do and keep in contact to let them know the progress of the project. Not only will they appreciate it, but you might even learn something that will save you a lot of time.

http://seantevis.com/

Check out his source code! That’s smart campaigning!

Jakob Nielson’s article on Quantitative Analysis explains why sometimes numbers are misleading.

Chris Fahey alerts you to not get caught up in looking for science in the art of user research. He explains how some companies require statistics to prove something works. You can make numbers say anything you want.

I’m not saying statistics are useless and user research doesn’t give data. But user research is about finding patterns in a specific set of users: patterns that should translate into product behavior.

Sites designed for accessibility (including this one) look just fine in it and are very readable. Unfortunately, many of the sites on the web still haven’t discovered how to make sites accessible. Maybe with the proliferation of more web-enabled devices like the Wii, people will realize that not everyone views the web the way they usually do. The benefit for most people is that they can view the web on non-standard devices. Another more important (my opinion) benefit is that people with disabilities will have access to the same content that everyone else takes for granted.

And there’s a lot of crap out there.

It’s hard to believe things from people who are only posting to convince you of something.

You can buy a newspaper, and with some reservations, believe what was printed. Go online and get the same info for free.
When you buy a newspaper, you’re actually buying journalistic integrity. You can trust those writers because they have fact-checkers and they’ll be fired if they abandon that trust.

You might think that a newspaper used to sell the news, but now they sell you trust. But in reality, their product hasn’t changed. The product is less valuable, however, if they are marketing the news. To continue to succeed, they need to market the trust.

This is an old perhaps obvious idea, but you’ve got to sell people on the benefits they get from using your product. In an dynamic world, the benefits people receive from a product are also dynamic. In order to really understand the benefit of a product, you have to understand your customers. It’s more than marketing, it’s truly and honestly fulfilling needs.

Another thing to be aware of is all the great freebies lots of programs throw in. Specifically, I’m talking about templates. Tons of software have template, but it’s not often that we really look to see what those templates have to offer.

Microsoft Word has hundreds of useful template, including legal documents, calendars, agendas, brochures, time management reminders for your team, etc… Really, there’s so much good stuff here, it’s worth it to take a few hours and figure out which ones are useful for your business. Just make sure make a note of it. After all, it’ll do you no good to flip through the templates if you forget to ever use them. I’ve got a word document on my desktop that has a list of templates useful for my team to use on projects. Whenever we get a new project, I’ve already got a huge resource of materials to help us organize, manage, and develop.

The same goes for most products from Adobe, especially InDesign.

Packaged templates are another oft overlooked feature, along with shortcut keys, that can drastically improve your productivity. The trick is taking the time to know what’s there and remember to use them.

Alternatives to physical books are popping up. E-book readers allow you to carry hundreds of different books with you.
The market isn’t very large right now and the technology certainly has room for improvement. Still, the publishers seem to be creating pioneering a new trail for delivering books.

So what’s the advantage of reading text on a $300 plain black-and-white display like on the Amazon Kindle when I already have a perfectly good laptop? Especially when most book are electronically designed these days. Well, books get leaked as PDF’s. Perhaps publishers are starting to get on board with e-books for DRM reasons. It’s harder to steal a book on proprietary technology.

A book’s PDF is going to be leaked whether or not there’s also an eBook version released. Regardless, not all publishers are keeping the PDF’s from the public. Rosenfeld Media, founded by an interaction designer, sells not only hard copies of books but PDF versions as well. The best part is that the PDFs are designed to be easy to read on a computer. Now there’s some incentive to buy. It’s cheaper than the book, full color, and you can start reading it instantly.

Do you like holding a book and seeing it on your shelf? When you buy the hard copy, the PDF is available to you for free. Start reading immediately while you wait for the actual book to get mailed.

They’re also thinking about releasing a version of the PDF that can be efficiently printed for overseas customers who don’t want to pay for shipping but still like to hold a real book.

That’s embracing technology, instead of coming up with ways to protect yourself from it. That’s evolving your business instead of fighting environmental change.

Interaction Design vs Marketing

Interaction Design (IxD) is the intersection of business and user needs to create a product that fills everyone’s needs. When I was explaining IxD to my dad, he asked if it was like marketing. There are similarities, but IxD is concerned with understanding people at a different phase in their relationship with the product than marketing is.

Marketing is focused on moving the person-product relationship to the purchase point. Convince the person the product is right for them. IxD is concerned with the person-product relationship AFTER the purchase point. Marketing is about designing a message to persuade a person to want a product. Interaction Design is about designing a product that fulfills a persons needs. IxD feeds back into marketing when enthusiastic users spread word of the product through reviews, word-of-mouth, and using it in public.

The key to success in either field is in understanding the customer, but the focus is very different and the way you segment your research participants is different. With marketing, your segments are based on buy habits, with IxD, your segments are based on user goals. People from several different marketing segments might share the same goals in a product, while certain other people from those same marketing segments might have completely different goals.

In order to develop products for goals instead of marketing segments, we do something similar to ethnographic research

Ethographic Research vs Observational Research

Ethnographic research is when you immerse yourself into a society and find out what it’s like to be a part of that society. The idea is that the best way to understand a different culture is to immerse yourself in it.

Observational research does the same thing. For interaction designers, the goal is to understand a corporate environment, a users daily routine, how they use existing tools, etc… With that data, they can figure out how to design a tool that best fits into that environment.

You can’t just ask people what the environment is like. It’s difficult to explain and dynamic. You’ll get different answer from different people.

You can’t just ask people what they want. You need to know WHY they want it. Then, you can develop something they didn’t even think about that could exceed their expectations.

Design = Collaboration

After getting your research, you’ve got to design the product to fit the goals you’ve observed. You don’t get to design whatever you want. The credit for the design lies with the users. They decided how it should work. You are merely implementing their design.

Additionally the business needs are considered. A design ideas that fills both the user needs and the business needs makes for a great design principle.

Conclusion

To be a great designer, you’ve got to be a great researcher and collaborator of ideas.

Well, use your avoidance mentality to your advantage! Once you decide you really don’t want to do something, you’ve got all the motivation you need to do your less important task. Your reluctance to start the most dreaded task reminds you of everything else you have to do.

“Hmm, I need to do that, but I’ve got all these other things I need to do. I’ll do them first.”

-Johnny Procrastinator

That’s why lists are important:

1. They give you something productive to do when you procrastinate
2. You get a sense of accomplishment when you check them off the list, adding fuel to your motivation

Another key to motivation is to make your goals public. It’s harder to procrastinate when you’re being held accountable.

I sometimes find I have a lot of things going on in my head. When I don’t want to do something, I suddenly become interested in everything. It’s hard to get started. Surfing the web and doodling take over. Taking a minute to meditate calms me down and then I break my goals down into shorter tasks and write them down. Once I’m calm and start that first simple task, getting focused is a lot easier.

As Leonardo da Vinci said, “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”