Human Factors

Kai and I wanted to investigate a flight option to Australia. We need a multi-stop flight Wellington-Sydney-Brisbane-Wellington and requested options from Air New Zealand. It gave us a possible routing for $1,244.16, what we found a bit unreasonable.

Apparently Air New Zealand realized this as well, so it suggested a different, much cheaper routing. The only problem with this option – it doesn’t bring us to Sydney at all!!! I just imagine someone not checking the suggested alternative properly and ending up in Christchurch instead of Sydney…

WebDU 2008 will be held from 7th to 9th May at Starcity in Sydney, Australia.

If you’re living on this part of the hemisphere you should definitely go, but even if you’re living in other parts of the world it’s worth a trip (just combine it with a holiday trip around Australia or New Zealand).

German laws are quite tough when it comes to access to pornography for juveniles. While every porn provider needs to prove that teenagers can’t access their contents, internet amateur video platform YouPorn doesn’t have any access control mechanism at all. A German porn provider went to court on this matter and reached an injunction that internet provider Arcor has to block YouPorn for all 2.4 Million customers.

This is the first time in Germany that a carrier is made liable for content someone else generated. Where will this lead to?
(via e-commerce-blog.de).

After Adobe Max Kai and I wanted to upload an interview with Aral Balkan on SWX to Google Video. We had never done this before, we always used YouTube so far. But YouTube doesn’t accept videos longer than ten minutes, so we tried Google instead. As we had started the uploading process, this window appeared on our screen:

The time specification of “more than 3 remaining” is quite confusing – it will take 3 what? Days? Hours? Minutes? By leaving out one single word, Google caused a very confusing user experience. After one minute the number still hadn’t changed, so we decided to cut the interview down to ten minutes and now you can find it on YouTube.

(This video is really just about SWX, it hasn’t much to do with UX)

Finally we’re back home in Wellington. I could write a novel about my travel experience, especially in the US, but I better keep my promise to deliver some more infos from Max… ;-)

A couple of cool new things were presented at the Sneak Peek session. As always everything shown is pre-alpha and there is no guarantee for further development or publication. One of highlights was certainly Thermo, a new tool which allows designers to create Rich Internet Applications in a very visual manner. Artwork can be converted into working components in a single click. Aral Balkan took a video of the sneak peek session, and it’s definitely worth a look. Aral recorded the sneak peek demonstration of Flash Player 10 as well.

The other presentations in a quick overview:
1. Visual Communicator 3
Interesting solution for easily creating video content.
2. “Pacifica – Adobe VoIP-Technologie that can be used with own Flex- and AIR-applications
3. Flash Home for Mobile
Mobile booting directly into a Flash Lite application as a home screen (incl. adaptation of background)
4. Photoshop Express Online
Unbelivably cool consumer version of photoshop as hosted service
5. Fireworks “Next”
6. ColdFusion
7. Web2Print
A combination of InDesign Server and Flex
8. PDF Packaging
Acrobat PDF reader AND Flash Player rolled into one (to embed eg flash videos in a PDF document), PDF goes future proof!
9. Flex Builder Linux
1o. Flash and C/C
11. iSeam
A brilliant tool for manipulating (esp. resizing) photos (the inventor got employed by Adobe within minutes after the video appeared on youtube).

The last session of MAX 2007 and I’m really tempted to skip this one. But being the good girl that I am, I finally decide to go, only to find out that it is at the other far end of the conference centre and it takes me ages to get there. So I’m late and when I sneak in Duane has just begun to show his personal Top 10 list of Bad Form Design. Some designs are really shocking and the following list of how-to and how-not-to do things results out of the forms shown and he not only talks about what’s wrong with examples but shows us how to create better experiences:
- Tabbing order is important
- Avoid Wrong Field and Data Types (eg country codes drop down instead of free text in “country of origin”-fields)

- Don’t make fields too small
- Think about the process, don’t force people to double entry
- Validating multiple fields onBlur()
- Stick to the right order, take care of dependancies (eg ask for “country” first to make sure the country has a state or zip code
- Never script without thinking
- Resetting all field can rarely be justified!
Important: Know the logic and process behind the form, understand the scope and breadth of the users, makes visual appearance so great the users would never have to use a manual!!!

I’m really tired now and getting a headache, so I missed to write down a few things, sorry for this!

That was Adobe MAX 2007 for me. I will add some pictures and comments during the next couple of day as well as a summary of the Sneak Peek session and the big party on Tuesday night.

This is the first XD guy not starting with an explanation of the XD team and their principles. Good, by now everyone at least a bit interested in them knows anyway… ;-)

Mobile devices have evolved from merely functional tools to our constant companions. But the web experiences that we can get with our mobiles are boring, especially Facebook and MySpace, the most common social networks, look awful on the small screen. Josh shows some examples how the sides could look better, richer, more accessible. He shows the outcome of a survey that mentions iPhone owners with 77% being the most satisfied users of mobile phones and sees a real opportunity for designers and developers in this changing industry. But how to get up the experience to this level? First of all it needs to be an experience that puts the user first, they must be expressive and desirable. For this it’s important to know the user and his behavior.

Design principles for creating engaging mobile experiences:
- The Mobile Context is Relevant (they should not only be smaller, but smarter than desktops => focus on the user’s mobility, fitting, get the hardware to test immediately. As an example he shows google maps on a mobile, which was just text in the beginning and was changed to a great application for mobile devices after the problem was realized.)
- Capture and Guide Users (=> establish clear focus, direction and emphasis, Maintain context, Preview and deliver. As an example he show Yahoo go, which is today easy to use)
- Differentiations is a Feature (=> stylize, demonstrate brand, deep customization, thrill, fresh and dynamic. As an example he shows “Living World”, an application that gives an identity to the device)
Sum up: there is a hunger for mobile experience and providers who realize this potential we have an amazing opportunity.