Self Checkout, what a fun if only there would not be an "assistent"

Sometimes there is no way out, saturday, IKEA Hell.

After nearly kicking 2 lovely jovely couples that seam to have a romantic moment in saturday afternoon in IKEA (for God’s sake, how is that possible?) and being distracted by stuff I really don’t want but my wife yes, we arribved at THE QUEUES.

Queues

And if I say queues, I mean mega queues. As a bit of a gadget freak I wanted to try their self checkouts. In the supermarkets they work OK if you don’t have a granny in front of you that is scared by every sound. (Got the hint UX designers….)

I must say that they are not too bad, rather cool actually. You can do a lot, cancel and have most of the options you have when interacting with a human being.

The Human Being

But there comes the problem! The Human Being. In this case an assistent that was there to help you and man, she screwed up big time. I tried to tell her in a friendly way that I knew how to do it, but I guess she wanted to show off her knowledge of the system and there we went.

So how did we end up? Having to queue again after having to endure a long queue of people staring and sighting while we were waiting for the assistent to make a mess.

Conclusion

Not too bad these self checkout. As long as they would be SELF Checkout!

Cloud based Business Analytics from Gooddata

SaaS and the Cloud are great. You have all your data available easily and from wherever.

If you are doing a good job and have great API’s to extract from and enter data into your application you open the true gates of heaven.

Being a fan of Tim Berner Lee’s call for action: RAW DATA NOW! it creates loads of possibilities that you most probably didn’t think about.

One we did think about though is the possibility to have good analytics and business intelligence.

Business Intelligence: A market with little innovation

Looking at the big guys like Cognos, SAP and IBM there is not a massive amount of innovation going on in this market. Huge monsters of thousands of features (you must do something to defend your price) usability and ease of use is placed as a priority after the feature shopping list.

So how come that this hasn’t changed?

Until now the data to base the analytics on is local on your network, in your software or on one database. So you need something local to harvest all this data and as standards are lacking something that can read loads of different data.

The Dashboard: Nothing more needed

Go and check with your CVFO and CEO and see what data they are really looking at. Observe… Do they go into all little details, create reports, interlink tables? I bet you they don’t. Most probably they have 1 dashboard with all they need. And if they need more, what happens? Yep, they ask the assistant or admin person to create them a report.

So why all the fuzz if only 1 dashboard per person is needed? Most probably you need a lot of data to create this simple dashboard. Data from your sales team, web analytics, online marketing and financial team. For fun just draw your ideal Business Intelligence dashboard and then go into details on what you need to create these graphs, bart charts and indicators.

Data in The Cloud: Mash you Way Up To The Gates of Heaven

With Google Analytics as a good trend setter for analytics with a user interface that doesn’t require a big fat manual (is there a one actually?) more are to follow. One recent great product I spotted is Good Data that is easy to use and has the possibility to mash up data from different sources. Tim Berners Lee must love this!

Oh yeah, and it is in the Cloud obviously, so light, no setup, not being stuck in a data format.

> Visit the Gooddata website

The Joy of Mashups! What do you get if you join location based information with your camera? Right: augmented reality.

An image of an F16 pilot shooting down planes comes to mind.

A Dutch company created an app for Android that does precisely so.

> Check out the video

> Layar´s website

> Related: MIT´s Sixth Sense

Google launching Chrome OS, I guess some people will start sweating...

How much fun, a desktop OS from Google. Not a surprise, but still a nice message to shake it all up a bit.

CNET calls it a nuclear bomb and I guess it is.

What does that al mean for the UX sector?

Make our life easier. Maybe one day we can stop developing .exe´s and apps for MAC and make everything using web technologies like HTML, Java and Flash. But there is still a long way to go. Promise is 1, actual market share is 2.

 Save Development Costs

No need for parallel developments for web, Windows XP, Windows Vista. Maybe this once thought dream of unified browsers will come true…

> Read the whole article at CNET

Does it Smell which wine you are drinking?

Let’s be honest: buttons suck. Dropdowns suck, sliders suck, everything that makes you think sucks.

Example: 1:45 AM. You want to get money our of an ATM, you are not very sober and next to a bar and ran out of money. You enter your card, type in your PIN code, now the fun starts. Questions start popping up.

“Money Operations” “Transfer money” “Print out statements” “Change PIN” ”Order Tickets”. It is 1:45! What do you think I am here for, to wash my laundry! NO, get me the money and stop bothering me. Who wants to print out statements in the middle of the night?

So all information is there, we know the time, we know what the most common interaction is (get money out) so why do we need that many buttons?

Slaughter the Button – Use Environmental Input

Computers are so good in calculating, remembering, connecting, so why can´t we (interaction designers and usability people) not use that information to stop bothering the user?

If we know where you are, why show you restaurants on the other side of the world? If I know that you are 90 years old, why try to sell me diapers? If you know that I am using IE7 on Windows Vista, why show me solutions for XP?

Sensors, Bluetooth, GPS, etc…

As we know even know where you are, we know what is around you (Bluetooth), what time it is, what temperature it is and sometimes we can now even now more things like your weight, your sex, name, interests etc. Why ask when you already know?  

No excuse except that it can get pricey.

Ask yourself:

• What do I already know that I don´t have to ask the user?
• What information can I obtain using sensors or connecting to a site so I don´t have to ask a user for input and so I can make a decision for him or her.

Keep your office organized using Post-its

Post -it o Post-it

You make my world so bright and shiney

You keep all well organized

Make it possible to change on the fly and not loose track

Re-arrange without 20 Outlook emails

Add colour to my work life

Serve as office wallpaper and decoration

Let me draw and scratch and do card sorting

Let yourself being thrown away without having to click on “Yes I want to throw the blooming note in the trash and yes I know I will loose it forever, but I don’t care”

Post-it o Post-it

When are you going to create offices that have long and high white walls so everybody can use them?

Get maps, emails, pictures, translations etc within a few keystrokes

Mozilla build a great plugin for Firefox using a command line/search box that can take pre-build commands as well as natural language commands.

See it as a mix of Google, Wolfram Alpha, the good old command line and one of those helmets that knows what you are thinking.

For example, you write an email with an address and you want to add a map: whoppa, there it is. By typing 2 words or sometimes even a few words you get maps, translations using web services.

See how it all works at: http://vimeo.com/5091071

Or install and try it yourself: http://ubiquity.mozilla.com/

Why choose? Join the top two ones...

Lately I have been looking into the possibilities of merging the command line and the search box. Remember that nice black screen with the flashing white cursor?

The promise of the blinking cursor

Having loads of options in front of you, but no idea which ones? You could do whatever you want, but first you had to read the manual. But after you learned it all you felt great, you mastered it all and, oh, those poor people that had no idea…

Well, that same motivating effect happens when you are dealing with very technical savy users like system administrators. Give them something too “marketing” or something too easy to learn with no possibility to learn and A, they won’t learn and B, they don’t like it.

Why semi-difficult can be better

As mentioned in a research by Christof van Nimwegen sometimes you need to force users to learn, because like that next time they will be faster and the overall user experience will be better. This is by nomeans a motivation to get sloppy in UXdesign, but it shows you that you have to think about “what happens after the user knows the interface?”.

Do you offer a solution to learn more, extend the application, continue learning?

Phases of learning: The Next Step

If you want to keep users chained to your app I think you always need to have a next step, a new thing to learn and a very cost effective way is using the forgiving command line/search.

You type, You solve

Why is this so great? Well, you use Google all day? Why? Because you have a question? Maybe because it is soo simple? But Yahoo is too? But is that all? No, you have a problem to solve. So why not merge the search and the command line?

For example: you want to know what the time is in Tokyo. You use Google and it offers you a lot of pages. You have to search through them which takes time and after checking some pages you find the answer.

In your applications you can be more specific, offer better semantics. If you have a map application it is rather obvious they are searching for a place, in Microsoft Word people would search for a feature or an explanation on how to do something.

Offer the last step of learning in the shape of the search/commandline. Let them type what they want to do and then make your application do it. Be forgiving, avoid the well known “BAD SYNTAX” message. You can extend and make it as huge as you want, without confusing the user, keep them learning and in the mean time offer them a faster way to use your application.

Told you, the forgiving command line is the future….

Why drawing is faster - Try making an easy drawing like this in a program like Axure

There is quite a bunch of software on the market to create realistic prototypes, wireframes using the designs made in Photoshop, Illustrator etc.

It looks great but it partly misses the point in my opinion.

The whole joy of a wireframe is that it is fast, that you can check it fast and that it doesn’t look realistic.

Why realistic is no good

Imagine yourself in a meeting with developers, management, marketing and sales. You show a realistic prototype using the final design. What will be the reaction? “Great, so it is finished?” Well, it isn’t, that’s why it is a prototype.

Show a wireframe and they will start discussing what is good and what they don’t get. Or in other words, no distraction of the core purpose.

Why paper and pen is faster

Even for normal wireframes there is a lot of software on the market like Axure that is great in creating a prototype even for simple wireframes and they offer you the possibility to build towards a realistic prototype that serves for showing customers, usability testing and internal communication.

It does the job great but it takes more time than drawing and is no as flexible. So why bother?

As I am not working as a UX consultant and don’t have to present to my client a great looking prototype to defend my fee, I can save costs. I can imagine that for consultancy there is no way around it.

But even within a company a wireframe not done on paper can have its benefits. For example for internal communication between designers and developers.

How long does it take you to draw a wireframe? 3 minutes?

How long does it take to create an Axure wireframe? 15 minutes? You count.