I clicked the X in the lower right corner of the screenshot above. Just as I was about to click it I thought, “That&srquo;s an odd place for a Delete button…”

Only, of course, it wasn’t a Delete button. It’s the button you click when you want to tell the good people at Google Voice that their transcription wasn’t helpful.

I know why I clicked it. I was looking for a way to delete a voice mail and that was the first thing I saw that matched my mental model, so to speak. Back to my mistake. It wasn’t really a user error. Well, maybe it was if I could easily recover from it, but I can’t.

There’s no way to deselect a radio button. That’s just not how they function. I know. You know this already. So do most smart people like you and me. And yet…

Radio buttons are very handy, but I don’t think they are useful for a binary choice. At least, not Yes/No.

Better Yes/No

Yes. Makes sense. I’m a great designer. You are, too. This isn’t an earth-shattering design change. But it does allow for a user to recover from a mistake. You can deselect a checkbox.

So consider this a friendly reminder: Radio buttons are for choosing between mutually exclusive… um, choices. But for the most part, they are better suited when the user has to choose between 3 or more things.

There are a lot of things about design that we (as designers) can count on:

• Humans are readily predictable; they rarely do what they say they do.
• The environments in which humans act and interact are readily predictable; they are easy to observe and change.
• Humans hate being observed and changed.

Myths

Myths are stories that we rely on in times of uncertainty. They often stem from truth but in the retelling become broader in context and oddly less applicable to most situations.

They are plenty of myths in design. They tend to get tossed around in meetings by designers and non-designers alike and usually start with “I think the users will…” Thinking the users will do something is a good place to start, but the conversation usually ends there.

Here’s a myth, based on 10-year-old research, we can all agree upon:

“Research shows no reliable differences in reading speed or user preferences for twelve point Times New Roman or Georgia (serif fonts), or Arial, Helvetica, or Verdana (sans serif fonts).”

—Source, usability.gov

Or can we agree upon it? Is 10-year-old research good enough to still rely upon, especially on the web? It’s something I’ve stated, in different forms, over the years. But no one I’ve worked with really wants to use 12-point (equivalent) font-size and very few think Times New Roman should be allowed on the web other than ironically, like Comic Sans. Yet, research shows…

There’s plenty more where that came from and I don’t just mean on that site. Heuristics (rules of thumb) are myths of sorts. There are just certain ways we all go about designing that are steeped in myth.

I am not saying I never rely on design myths; I do. I believe most design myths can be relied upon. My caution here is that they should also be questioned from time to time. Environments change. People change. And at some point it won’t make sense to worry about defining a font-size or font-family.

Mythos

Let’s go back in time to my φίλος Aristotle. Mythos is the vehicle by which actions are carried out. Aristotle cared more about, in this case, goat songs while we care more about workflows.

While there is still plenty of Feature-based Design happening in the world (read: job security) more and more and more I see a move toward Task-based design. Designers and those they work with are starting to ask, what really needs to be done? The problem that remains is the tendency to focus on what the business needs to accomplish.

For his part, Aristotle focused so much on plot that he neglected (or didn’t think it was as important for the creation of conflict which drives the change and… k, another post, for another blog, for another time) character. Sound familiar? You work with people who know how the system should be designed and how users should, well, use it. But who asked the user what they think?

If you have a UXer (hey, you could have me!) in your company, you’re in a better place that you’d be without one. They can ask what the user wants, assess what the user can do, and balance that with what the business wants and can do. Perfect. Done and done.

If you don’t have a UXer, you are not screwed. Remember, you are working with people who know the business side of the equation. Run with it. Design around it. But early and often, get feedback from users on how the design is progressing. (And yes, it’s fine to simply ask, ““What do you think?”) You wouldn’t implement a system without starting with Unit Testing, right? Please say, “Right.”

Beliefs Should Be Fluid

There is no right way to design. There are good ways and bad ways.

You can get a good percentage of completeness in your design just by having a decent designer who knows the design myths well. And all without talking to one user. There are dos and don’ts in design; follow them and you’ll have a decent design.

The caution here is two-fold: you won’t get a great percentage of completeness without involving users, and you can’t always rely on design myths to be true in every context.

Question, question, question. Question business intention. Question user goals. Question your own beliefs about design. It’s important to know that you are making design decisions not out of hat, but that meet the needs of all aspects of the system within the correct context(s) of use. Which on its own is really hard to do.

There’s no need to add to the collective insanity in the world by designing without this level of attention. Things are bad enough out there. While that kind of drama may be good on stage (I’m looking at you Oedipus), it isn’t good in a web application.

Fewer dishes to wash. Recyclable as always (though some places won’t take pizza boxes). Easy to use. And I bet as close to 100% intuitive as you can get.

This is good design. Taking an everyday product and task and making it so much better it makes you wonder why it took so long for someone to think of this.

Love it. Would love to talk with the people who designed it. The design process I suspect is simple, but what was the spark; the moment someone said, “You know…”

Below are some tested (as in, I’ve done them) and not tested (as in, I haven’t done them, but I suspect it would work) ideas on how to use Twitter for your own UX needs. But keep in mind Twitter is a community. Well, it is a collection of communities. As such it will take investment on your part to become part of one or more communities before many of these ideas will be useful to you.

Because the one thing each idea depends on is a lot of people seeing your message and some of them caring or having enough free time to respond. It takes time to build that kind of relationship. Unless you’re famous. Then you just snap your fingers. And if you are famous you’re probably not reading this anyway.

Ways to Use Twitter — Tested

Research. This is duh, but I figured I should put it anyway. There’s plenty of pieces about how to use Twitter for your research so I’ll keep this one short. Twitter Search is a great way to find what people are thinking/doing with what you care about most. And you can save searches and trend over time.

I think of this type of research more on the qualitative side. I wouldn’t go so far (unless I had to) as to start categorizing feedback you find via people’s updates, then turning them into stunning pie charts, but at the very least you can get an understanding of some of the problems people run into. That’s one thing Twitter seems to enable: complaining.

Recruiting. I’ve used Twitter a number of times to recruit participants for usability testing. I didn’t keep track, but my guess is my calls for participation were about 50% successful. Which isn’t bad considering all I am doing is typing 140 characters and essentially doing Lazyweb recruiting.

I wouldn’t rely on this 100% for my recruiting needs, but I was very pleased with the people I got. Usually it wasn’t the people who follow me that ended up participating, but people they knew. I suspect if I weren’t looking for a specific profile and was just going with “must have used the internet in the last 10 years” my success rate would have been much higher.

Surveying. Whether you are linking to a survey tool or using hashtags or @s to garner feedback, Twitter is perfect for quick response surveys.

While not necessarily in the vein we are talking about, StrawPoll is a good example of what you can do with Twitter to get feedback from thousands of people. I never went this elaborate, but it wouldn’t be too hard to do.

With Twitter, surveying for quick response is as easy as updating with “[Survey] What process do you go through when deciding if a piece of software is right for your needs? @/DM your responses. RT plz!”

That’s 130 characters and a minute of your time. If you get 5 responses, it’s worth it because you now have 5 people who more than likely (given the open communication nature of Twitter) will be willing to do a follow up interview with you on their feedback.

Design Review. Got a mockup, wireframe, prototype you want quick feedback on? Link it up. Obviously this has to be something you can share with the general public. While this idea is sound and works, it’s probably the least likely thing you’ll use Twitter for. Unless you are getting post-implementation feedback on something that’s publicly accessible.

Remember a few paragraphs ago when I said people love to use Twitter to complain? Sending out a link to a mockup is a sure-fire way to get feedback on all the things that aren’t working in your design. I only did this once pre-launch, but it was for a design that was decidedly on the realign side of things. We were just moving a few things around on a page that was publicly accessible.

Ways to Use Twitter — Not Tested

Diary Study. I had this idea while waiting for the Twitter UX session to start at the BostonUPA MiniCon. Someone sitting behind me asked me a question and we got to talking. I mentioned a couple of the ideas above and then said this one without skipping a beat.

Imagine if you will, and you will dammit, getting people to update on Twitter instead of writing an email or filling out a form online or even writing with pen and paper. Diary Studies can be useful ways to gather data on what people do in the so-called Real World.

In this case though, they update on Twitter. Time and date are built in. The character limit means they have to keep it short, but that also lowers the barrier for doing the task in the first place. “Tried to sign up for a new account. Spent 2 minutes trying to figure out where to go to do it. Grr.” 101 characters, 10 seconds of typing, and they are on their way.

For the study, you follow them. Or they @ you. Or use a hashtag. Or any combination thereof. Probably doing mutual following is the easiest and leaves more characters for feedback. I suspect your participants would need to be on Twitter already for this to be done with little overhead. For participants not on Twitter, you’d have to explain what it is, how to use it, etc. Headache, but doable if needed.

Focus Groups. This is an extension on surveying, but instead of sitting back and waiting for the thousands of responses (yeah right) you keep the conversation going. When a few people respond, you update that they did and include their @ names. Tell people they can follow and join the conversation by using search to see what people are saying; just like you are. Ask questions, see what other people are asking and saying. RT if someone asks a good question you want feedback on.

For the most part, conversations blossom and wither pretty quick on Twitter, but I suspect this would work, especially on a topic that is both broad enough to entice many people, but specific enough to corral the conversation to a particular topic.

Your Mileage Will Vary

Like I said, you need to be invested in Twitter to make these ideas work, but I think it’s worth it. This won’t replace the usual methods for gathering feedback, but I truly feel it’s a great way to get quick responses to design decisions you need guidance on.

I am very interested to hear if you’ve used Twitter for your UX work and how well it went.

Above (click the image to embiggen, the image that is. I’m not selling anything here.) please find one info graphic comparison of salsa hotness. See those little chili peppers? They’re telling you something.

We are a two-salsa household. My wife prefers Hot salsa and my daughter and I prefer Medium. We shop at Trader Joe’s (TJs) a lot so it’s easy to grab a jar of Trader Joe’s® Double Roasted Salsa (Medium) and a jar of Trader José’s Hot Chipotle Salsa (Hot, as the name suggests).

Above, the Meduim is on the left and the Hot is on the right. Now, I realise that the graphics used to indicate hotness on each jar are “for illustrative purposes only.” But taking a closer look, as I was wont to do during dinner tonight, you notice that each graphic uses a different scale by which to measure calienteness.

Medium uses 0-7 while Hot uses 0-11. From a scale perspective, their spiciness becomes virtually the same. By taste however, they are not the same. At all. ¡Ai yi yi!

Label Design

While these salsas are not made by TJs, they are made for TJs. As such, and as evidenced by the labels here, TJs has control over how the labels are designed.

Here is an opportunity. You have a category of product (salsa) with different varieties. There is a single identifying characteristic about salsa in which everyone is interested. You have an easily identifiable icon with which to indicate said characteristic.

Why not use a standard graphic?

I am not an aficionado of salsa (or chili peppers), but would the Scoville Scale provide a reference in this case?

Supporting the Decision Making Process

Yes, yes. I am “going off” on salsa label design. But think about all the salsa you’ve ever bought. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Sometimes you’ll get a Medium and it will burn your tongue off. Other times you go for a Hot and get barely a tingle. It isn’t enough to say Mild, Medium, or Hot (I’m looking at you Indian restaurants!).

That might be enough to get the consumer to the right class of salsa, but if there was a 0-12 scale and the graphic neatly identified a Medium as a 6 (compared to a Medium 5 or 7 let’s say) you’d have a better understanding of just how spicy that fancy-pants Corn Pepper Black Bean Relish Salsa was going to be.

There’s a lot going on in a grocery store. Particularly TJs on a Saturday. Designing your labels to support decision making can help your customer. It would ensure your customers are getting exactly what they want. It could also get your customer to branch out a little and buy 2 different Mediums instead of one. “Matthew! Increase sales, you say? ¡Ai yi yi!”

¡Ai yi yi! indeed.

And so, I walked to the restroom and did so. And that’s when I realized what I wanted to write about.

Here Begineth the Rant

… Men… honestly. How can you aim wrong while peeing into a urinal? Are you in that much of a hurry? Do you think you need to stand back 10 feet? I don’t understand …

This is what goes through my mind, more often then I’d like, when I use a public restroom. I become greatly annoyed and I can’t for the life of me figure out how anyone could do it wrong.

Which got me thinking: is this a situation of user error or a flaw in the interaction design?

A Peeing Experience By Design

Let’s think this through… If the Urinal was first patented in 1866 that means there’s been 142 years of opportunity to iterate on the design and the experience. And yet we still see yellowish stains or puddles on the floor in front of most public urinals.

I know, kinda gross but let’s leave our willies at the door on this one. I mean, the heebie-jeebie kind of willies, not… oh never mind. Just accept that all humans pee and it’s a natural thing and there’s something wrong with the way it works in public. I mean public restrooms. In public is another issue altogether.

The urinal is designed such that a man can aim in a limited arc along a horizontal plane. The sides of the urinal wrap some to allow for left or right side aiming to take place, thus limiting the amount of splash-back from the main “face” of the urinal. A protrusion at the bottom helps to catch the stream of “down aimers.”

Ideally, if the man stood within a few inches of the opening of the urinal he should have no trouble urinating without making a mess. At least, that’s the intention of the urinal’s design.

Why No Iteration

A lot can be assumed about the Peeing Experience by experiencing it oneself. One can also easily assess environmental factors. It’s even possible to understand some of the ergonomic hurdles to urinating successfully.

But one of the best ways Interaction Designers figure out what’s wrong with the current state of a design or experience is to observe the practice in its natural setting (contextual inquiry).

But therein lies the problem. Can you imagine the recruitment process?

Hi, I’m a designer currently working on a new interaction paradigm for the excretion of bodily fluid of the wastial variety. I’d like to observe you “doing your business” so to speak from 10:00 to 10:15 this Friday at your workplace.

I’ll watch you urinate and ask you some questions about your experience; about your approach to the urinal, what problems you might have urinating, and what you like most about using a urinal. I’ll also ask you to fill out a short demographic survey (after you wash your hand of course!).

We likely won’t use the entire 15 minutes, but I’ve padded our time just in case you aren’t able to relax enough to make.

Um… no.

More Research Is Needed

This is physical harm problem. I’ve taken a light hand here, but puddles of liquid on a tile floor are often a recipe for disaster and pain. Hence why companies put up “Caution: Wet Floor” signs after one-too-many courtroom appearances.

It’s a public health problem. Many diseases are transmitted via bodily fluids. A good design can help limit the likelihood of transmission, but perhaps it is also about behavior.

It’s a trust issue. You’ve been to restaurants that have messy bathrooms, right? How does that make you feel about the quality of the dining experience? Maybe you don’t think about it consciously at the time, but restroom cleanliness is one of the review factors for health inspections. Dirty restrooms are often an indication of a larger sanitation problem.

Yes, I thought about peeing from a Design perspective and tried to make you think about it too. Hopefully I did that in a non-icky way.

What gross thing/experience have you redesigned recently?

A long time ago, in a state far, far away I used to be a Barista. Of course back then we didn’t call it “Barista.” We called it “working in a café.”

When I first started, we had a real hard-ass manager. Thankfully.

He’d sit out with the customers and watch us work, every once in a while glancing at his stopwatch. I worked in a place that would often do 2000 drinks in a day. I’ll do the math for you. That’s about 2.5 drinks a minute (on average).

When you are producing 2.5 drinks a minute you can’t have any bottlenecks in the process. Here was the set up with 4 people:

Register This was the person who took the drink orders, took the money, and got the regular coffee (non-espresso) drinks.

Shots This person pulled all the espresso shots, syruped up the cups and told the Milk person what was coming down the line.

Milk This person steamed all the milk, did whipped cream, capped the cups, and was the last customer contact in the process so they were also the “have a good day” person.

Barback Very important position. Kept everything stocked, cleaned tables, dealt with bean orders, washed dishes. Made sure they place runs smoothly. Which is everyone’s job, but particularly the Barback.

Every half hour or so we’d all switch one position down the line so we wouldn’t get bored and to just shake things up. We would also randomly spring into dance, singing Hava Nagila, but that’s another story for another time.

“Interesting.” But…?

Here is where Starbucks comes in…

This morning, I stopped by the Starbucks that’s about half-way between my house and work. I was there for almost 15 minutes. All for a quad Americano.

There were 5 workers behind the counter. One on the register, one doing all the drinks, two taking orders and getting backed goods, and one cleaning tables. As I stood there, I channeled that hard-ass manager, looking for the single point of failure. I found several.

There were 6 people waiting for their drinks ahead of me. There were 7 people waiting in line behind me by the time I ordered and by the time I left there were roughly 20 people in the place, none of whom were sitting at the tables.

Earlier this year, Starbucks shut down for a day to retrain everyone. Quality is important, and whether the Training Day worked in the respect is up for debate, but in a café where your primary customer is a grab-and-go, speed is almost more important than quality.

How to Fix it

The café model I learned from is a good one. But there are some specific factors to take into consideration in any redesign. Start with asking good questions.

Environment Such a key factor when designing a physical space. Where do customers enter? Do they exit the same way? How long can the line be before people are waiting outside? Where do people wait for their drinks?

A café is entirely about Flow. When the Flow breaks down, the customers lose confidence. Confidence in quality and in their ability to get to their next stop on time. You have to take the customer’s goals in mind. If you are building a Café where you want people to sit for hours on end, obviously you are going to make different choices, but here we are talking about speed.

Efficiency Where are the bottlenecks? What blocks you from achieving your goals? What do you lose by completely removing those blocks?

Let’s say instead of keeping me there for 15 minutes you want to keep me there for less than 3 minutes. How can you make that happen?

Effect Okay, so I am enjoying some alliteration here… If you are able to answer the previous questions, you need to know how things are changing. You know how many people you get during the morning rush so you need to keep track how that changes based on the changes you make. This is more of a long-term measurement, but one that needs to be looked at daily.

How much time passes from when I enter the building to when I leave? You have to keep track even if that means someone sits in the corner with a stopwatch.

Great. Now I know how to redesign Starbucks. Thanks.

I am only using Starbucks as an example here. When you start to think in terms of “everything is an interface/interaction” you can do a lot to make things better by applying general Design methods and principles. I think talking in terms of concrete example is the best way (for me at least) to get a point across.

Everything gets designed. How well things are designed usually depends on how good your questions are at the beginning.

What did you design/redesign on your way to work today?

Do they wonder how the inhabitants of the buildings they’ve worked on changed the space or if the inhabitants have adapted in negative ways?

Here’s my case in point.

Someone here at work, probably walking up the stairs, likely hit or scraped their shoulder on the post that attaches the glass retainer above the stairwell to the wall. My guess is it has happened more than once and someone got fed up and redesigned the post.

If I were the architect or interior designer (not sure whose shoulders this falls on) of this building and I saw this… I’d feel ashamed. In software terms, this is the equivalent of sticky notes on the monitor, or cheat sheets, or… training! Something that had to be made in order to get the user safely around the poorly designed interface.

Post-Launch Assessment

Design is a cyclical process. At least that’s how I view it. And viewing it that way provides me with more work, which equals more money so you should agree with me. :)

It isn’t enough to design something, test it, build it, then launch. If you plan on maintaining what you launch (or your client does) you need to understand how people interact with and use what you’ve made.

That means giving them a few months to use it, then going out and seeing what they’ve done to make things better. Your findings can lead into the next round of requirements for v2. This is why having someone who is good at interviewing people (interaction designers, HCI people, usability specialists, whathaveyou) involved in all aspects of the design and development cycle.

These are the people you can rely on to tell you about the sticky notes, cheat sheets, and tennis balls.

Artifacts

Some of the workarounds I’ve mentioned are artifacts: physical items that help users deal with their everyday world. You won’t find them with a survey, or a remote usability test, or reading tech support tickets.

You have to step into the user’s world and see how they live. If you are in the biz, this is your Contextual Inquiry or Ethnography. But you don’t need fancy names to make a case for getting out into the user’s domain and talking with them.

Yes, it has a cost and it can be high. But it also has a distinct reward: you never know what people are really going to do with your product until you watch them use it. There could be opportunities abound.

Opportunities not only to fix problems you introduced in your design (for you will introduce problems) but gaps you didn’t know were there in the first place that you can fill with future revs or alternate products.

Consider

The next time you deliver a design to a client, or ship a product from your company consider including a free tennis ball for your customer. They probably won’t understand why, but then again you never know when a tennis ball will be handy to have around.