electronic museum

Entries categorized as ‘usability’

Ticket to ride. Just.

August 2, 2007 · 3 Comments

The examination of what makes for a good user experience is absolutely vital, and as you’ve probably gathered, I – like many others – think we ‘providers of tech’ often get basics wrong. In fact, depressingly, web/tech products seem to get things wrong more often than they get them right.

In order for this wrongness to happen, one of two things must have been an issue during the project process:

1) Belief that the end user isn’t terribly important
2) A ‘project interface’ issue – a gap in expertise between various departments or a (perceived) lack of cash or time.

It is nearly impossible to believe that the first is true – that project teams put together end-user tech without considering end-user needs. Sadly though, for one reason or another – usually IT teams thinking the technology is *everything* (”it’s really cool the way we’ve interfaced the Z60 box and the AR39 switcher. Besides, *I* understand the user interface so why won’t Dawn in Accounts…?”) – it does happen.

Gaps in project expertise are related but different, and easier to understand. Typically this occurs between designer and techy: each assumes the other is responsible for usability (or just ‘the user’) and in the end it turns out that neither focuses on this, the most crucial part of the product.

Now’s the time to bring in a real-world example. I buy my tickets for London on thetrainline.com for delivery to a ‘fast ticket’ machine at Bath Spa, as I do every week. The tech between the website and ticket machine is enormously impressive: a timetable lookup, a credit card transaction, a central database of bookings networked to any station around the country. Nice, and my thoughts go out to the poor people who had to do it.

So why is it that when I arrive at the (newly designed) ticket machine, I can’t see how to collect my ticket? There’s lots of station names, and a few other buttons, but nothing that tells me where my ticket actually is.

In the end I, like many frustrated users in front of bad UI’s both on- and off-line, start pushing random buttons. Eventually I try one that says ‘Tickets on Departure’. It works.

Sorry? What? Pardon?

‘Tickets on Departure’…..?

Not:
- ‘Prepaid tickets, press here’
- ‘Bought online?’
- ‘Pre-ordered tickets’
- ‘Collect your tickets’
- ‘Ticket collection’
- ‘Fast ticket collection’

…or any other sensible, obvious, meaningful choice of words. ‘Tickets on Departure’…

There’s some other badness going on – a touchscreen keyboard that isn’t arranged in QWERTY layout and the phrase ‘print journey’ rather than ‘print ticket’, but ‘Tickets on Departure’ is horribly bad. Crucially, it’s also right at the beginning of the process: your commitment is low, and peer pressure (the crowd building and tutting under their breath behind you) is high. Your natural response when that button isn’t right there in your face? Abort the tech and go ask a man instead.

I stood for a few minutes and watched other people with the machine. It turns out I’m not alone – the majority gave up, some asked a member of staff (who looked like he’d been asked before..). A couple pushed the last button remaining to them, as I had, and battled through.

Now I’m not big on mainframe stuff but the infrastructure required to do all that on/off-line talking feels to me like maybe 5 million quid, minimum? I’d imagine each ticket machine is probably £30k.

Seems a shame, doesn’t it? All that effort and money culminating in a crap UI which frustrates the very people it’s apparently built for.

Tell you what, I might see what I can find out about the project process in building these particular machines, and I’ll then post about what (if anything) I find…

Categories: design · technology · usability

Tate player. Underwhelming.

July 27, 2007 · 4 Comments

The Tate launched their BT Tate Player (no disguising the sponsorship there, then) a week ago. I have to say, I’m disappointed. When I first heard that they were going to be doing this I got really excited about the potential, but the finally-launched-product is pretty much a nothingness.

Not to say that the content isn’t great – it’s fabulous being able to watch a video of Howard Hodgkin talking about his stuff and I suppose the tabbed view of Gilbert and George adds certain dimensions that you wouldn’t get otherwise – being able to link to pictures and other related material is a no-brainer which works alright.

BT Tate PlayerThe thing that’s missing is any sense of community engagement, at all, anywhere. No comments, no rating systems, no discussions. In fact if I was being really mean (which I am when it’s lunchtime and I’m hungry) I’d say that the branding of a “player” implies something which does a collective something. This is just a page of videos linking into a Flash player. Strictly it isn’t “technology from BT” but “a web page including some HTML and a bit of Flash”. There’s some RSS in there, but hey, not exactly ground-breaking.

I’m not knocking the idea. It’s fantastic to see a gallery or museum doing video online (although at the Dana Centre we’ve been doing it for a fair time now using our, ahem, “Dana Centre Player”…) – it’s obviously the road ahead and it’s fantastic to see real artists talking about their work. In this way it does a good job at getting great content out to users. What I find annoying more than anything else about this is the amount of missed potential. It isn’t bad, but it just could be sooooo much better with ~really~ not much more work.

Interestingly I thought the same thing about the Tate Carousel – a “visual interface with Tate’s collection” (I won’t be sarcastic right now about what a “non-visual” interface into this particular collection would be..). It was almost really interesting, but then just wasn’t – it doesn’t actually do anything at all…

Following the launch of the “player”, Director of Tate Media, Will Gompertz said:

“..it’s an exciting project with limitless potential and we’re delighted to be able to share with a broader audience the original audiovisual content of the Tate Archive.“

So at least Mr Gompertz recognises that there is further potential in the project. With any luck this potential will be realised quickly and we’ll see phase II with some really nice community stuff going on, some tagging, embedding options, YouTube crossover, ratings, etc.

Right. I’m off to lunch before I start ranting at something else.

Categories: community · museum · tv · usability · video · web2.0

Visualising collections

July 24, 2007 · 1 Comment

I’m a big fan of the diagram. Anyone who has worked with me knows I tend to put ideas down as organograms, mind-maps and other scribbles: I’m pretty bad at understanding concepts unless I can sketch them. Visual cues, linkages, the ability to promote ideas, connect them together – all of these seem incredibly valuable when thinking about relationships between concepts, objects, web pages.

Visualisation of www.electronicmuseum.org.ukIn the same way, I find the means by which we browse collections of stuff online is usually wholly unsatisfactory. As Seb Chan said in his talk at Museums on the Web UK, the way in which hierarchies or search results are displayed on the web is almost always terribly pedestrian, and has no real-world connection at all. His example of the supermarket shelf struck a chord: we browse by casting our eyes over the range of products available, use visual cues to pick out the ones we think are interesting and then hone in on those.

Usually people talk in terms of two modes of findability: search (enter terms into box, get results as list) and hierarchy (follow increasingly specific taxonomical tree to your destination). I think there’s another, usually missed, which has at the heart of it the sense of serendipity. This is what “browse” is, really, when you think about it. It’s the means by which you can cast your eye over a whole range of things you don’t know you’re interested in yet and then focus in on things that catch your eye. This is probably why many people find the apparent chaos of a museum store as interesting as a set of interpreted objects in a museum gallery. The lack of order, the sense of finding something, is itself an important part of the experience.

Online museum collections often work on the assumption that people know what they’re looking for. Sometimes they do, in which case search and hierarchy work fine – but if they don’t, and are just “browsing” in the true sense of the word, then the tools at our disposal are slightly more interesting. As a diagram addict these particular tools and methods always interest me.

Here’s a few:

History Wired which has been around a long time but I still like it: A Java app (boo) developed by Smart Money lets you zoom in to objects – the size of which is influenced by the “votes” that have been received for that object. The application can be licensed but last time I asked it was frighteningly expensive…

The fabulous Music Plasma – a lovely Flash based app for finding and browsing bands – *please* will someone do this for museum collections??

Search Crystal – blogged about by Seb recently, a slightly ragged-looking but quite satisfying tool for displaying search results visually

If you think about the ways in which content is searched for and used in “web 2 ways” it is often about this serendipity; jumping across from topic to topic, from object to object, often with little sense of purpose but just a desire to be entertained. Sometimes you’re after specific things, but sometimes you just want to have a fun time…

Categories: design · museum · search · technology · ukmw07 · usability

Intertellywebvision

July 23, 2007 · 1 Comment

I’ve been planning a “what TV means on the internet” post for a while, a big part of which was going to be a comparison of what’s available right now.

Browsing through my vast backlog of stuff to catch up on after my holiday, I found this great roundup of UK-available “tv on web” services. So that’s saved me a bunch of time ;-)

What’s interesting / irritating about the situation right now is that we’ve got services provided by all the different content providers but have to download separate players for each one. This is a great example of an untenable user experience which needs sorting, big-time.

In the real world, I’m completely agnostic as to what channel I watch – as (I would imagine) a fairly typical viewer would be. I look at my TV guide, choose what I want to waste my time on, and weave a path between whatever channels have good stuff on. Bring what’s happening online right now into the living room and you’ve got a “what’s on the other television?” scenario – you have to “unplug” one application and boot up another to change channels. Very silly. There’s apparently a project underway to sort out this kind of issue by consolidating across the UK networks – try Googling for “Project Kangaroo“.

The nice thing about internet TV is that we’re all starting to get really excited about a technology which is very obviously at the beginning of its journey: now that we’ve got the bandwidth and the streaming technology to deal with the content, the improvements are going to be exponential over the next few months as people get to grips with the usability concerns. And that’s where it gets really interesting.

Categories: technology · tv · usability · web2.0

Techcrunch looks crap!

July 6, 2007 · 5 Comments

I just had a bit of a shock.

I’m an avid reader of TechCrunch – I like the topic matter, the bitchiness of Michael Arrington, the writing style, the fact that it’s a superb place for finding out about tech stuff.

But for about as long as I’ve read it, I’ve subscribed to their RSS feed and rarely, if ever, actually go to the site.

Techcrunch looks crap!This morning, though, I was looking for some stuff on internet TV for a blog post I’ve got planned. And bloody hell if TechCrunch isn’t completely awful…a terrible visual hell hotchpotch of random adverts, blog tech “stuff”, searchboxes, tagclouds…the design is terrible, the usability just completely shot…

The fact that I hadn’t noticed (because I haven’t been) says something pretty profound about the distributed web. If asked, I’d say TechCrunch is in my list of top 10 favourite websites, and yet actually – and I only just noticed – it’s not. The notion of a “favourite website” is completely wrong here. This is a great example of what I talked about at Museums and the Web conference – it’s only the beginning of a much more complex shift in what “having a website” means. TechCrunch is actually on my list of top 10 favourite content experiences – and the fact that it looks like crap doesn’t (usually) matter one jot to me. Except when I’m trying to find anything on the site. And if that’s the case – as is so often with on-site search engines – it’s actually much more effective to use Google’s “search this site” functionality than the in-built one on TechCrunch.

The fact that I’ve been reading this thing for years and haven’t even noticed how bad it is to look at says a lot about RSS but also about TechCrunch’s delivery of it: not only do they deliver the full story but it’s also HTML enriched. There’s actually little reason to go to the site itself.

What *really* bugs me, incidentally, is the way some blogs don’t deliver the full story via RSS but just the first few lines. The BBC are an example of this, and it’s a blinding example of organisational inertia (”we’ll get more traffic if we make people click through to the site”) vs user need (”I can’t be arsed to read this story if I can’t see it all here in my feedreader”).

Anyway. I’ll keep reading TechCrunch. But I might avoid the eyeglare and confusion by sticking to RSS.

Categories: content · design · technology · usability

Thought clarification: JUST DO IT but FOR A REASON

July 2, 2007 · 9 Comments

A long and interesting thread broke out on the Museums Computer Group mailing list today about how museums could use Facebook to their best advantage. As I said on the thread – although the question about how Facebook deals with organisations vs individuals is interesting, the key question to me is what we’re trying to get out of having a presence on social networking sites.

Although I spend a lot of time going on about how we should “just do it” (good tagline, that. Shame it’s been claimed by a global corporation of dubious ethics..), I’m also well aware that museums aren’t immune from the hype curve either. The suggestion we should “do something with Facebook” throughout the thread is terribly reminiscent of many requests I’ve had to “do web 2.0″. The conversation usually goes like this:

——————

Web team office, early morning. Somewhere a phone rings.

Web Team: “good morning, this is your friendly web team. how can I help?”

Important Person, usually somewhere high up in the organisation: “we need a blog/discussion board/wiki/podcast/facebook account/mobile website/[insert other new tech thingy here]“

WT: “why?”

IP: “because I read an article in the Guardian on Saturday and it’ll improve our productivity/sales/grooviness. Besides, it’s free”

WT: “what do you want to say on your blog/discussion board/wiki/[...you get the picture...] ?”

IP: “why does that matter?”

WT: “who is your audience?”

IP: “the kids, of course. da street. da yoof. innit?”

WT: …

IP: “right, I’ll hope to see some serious re-alignment of our visitor figures by, say, a week Wednesday. I is expectin’ big fings in da hood. Bitchin’. “

——————-

There’s a fine line of course between what I push for – technology growth, user understanding, fast to market, flexible applications – and the Important Person’s vision. This is a subtle game, and one which often causes concerns.

I see it like this:

> the mashup environment is about playing with technology – it is therefore partially technology driven (a bad thing) but also understands and build on content and data from disparate sources in the hope that the thing which pops out at the end is useful (a good thing). It relies on a Darwinian process to determine what works and what doesn’t: if your users like it, they’ll take to it and it’ll succeed.

> the drive to make things happen – the push which I believe museums should be making to be more leading than lagging – should always come out of user centred design. Websites should come from a user need. Ultimately, they should fill a hole in people’s lives. The bitter pill to swallow is that the needs of the institution aren’t always the needs of the user, and that’s where conversations like the one above start to cause pain.

Sometimes the needs of the institution do match (or can be bent so they match) the needs of the end user – this is when the best things happen. Take for example the fabulous English Cut blog – a fascinating look into the otherwise closed world of the Savile Row tailor. Hugh Mcleod helped put this together and he writes wonderfully about the value of the “micro smarter conversation” vs the value of the “macro brand metaphor”.

This is where web teams need to be incredibly savvy about what is out there and how to make this stuff happen. Actually, the conversation above should have a moment where Web Team gets in quickly with “Good plan, Mrs Important Person. How about a personal blog written by X about the way in which we Y”, thereby cutting off any possibility that you’ll “just do it” in the wrong direction with some god-awful corporate nonsense.

So….should museums be on Facebook? Yes, probably, if that presence does something interesting and motivating for users. Should museums be on Facebook just because it’s there? Obviously not.

Categories: design · experimental · innovation · mashup · museum · social networks · technology · ugc · usability · web2.0

Google tweaks again..

May 16, 2007 · Leave a Comment

So much for not testing on a live evironment…

My Google search results just turned up looking a trifle different. First of all this:

Half changed Google page

…and then a couple of minutes later, this:

Full changed Google page

TechCrunch wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. I’ve seen the left hand nav change that is on their post a couple of times but the shaded bar and dhtml dropdown is a new one on me…

Categories: design · search · technology · usability