Category — Real Time Collaboration

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ended his silence about the recent privacy controversies in a letter to tech blogger Robert Scoble and via an op-ed piece in the Wall Street journal. Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook security features were too convoluted and stated that “in the coming weeks, [Facebook] will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use”.  In addition, Zuckerberg promises that Facebook users will be given a much easier method for opting out of all third party services.

Zuckerberg’s response was prompted by a tidal wave of fury about Facebook’s lack of easy-to-understand and easy-to-use privacy options in its interface design from users across the globe.  An initial security glitch, in which some users were able to view the private chats or messages of their friends, created a snowball effect among users as they also began to complain that Facebook’s interface design was a conveyor of confusing privacy policies and made their private data to easily available to third parties.  One of the main problems with Facebook’s interface design, according to many users, is that there are too many settings and the settings are anything but usable or clear in terms of allowing users to make their desired selections.

Facebook and its dreaded partner sites

Facebook’s partner sites Yelp, Pandora, and Microsoft Docs all have access to your personal information unless you visit each site individually and opt out of information sharing. You can also by proxy share your friends’ information if they have not opted out on these websites.  So how do you opt out?  Well, Facebook makes that process very difficult according to the EFF.  The directions that Facebook provides users on its site about how to opt out of “intrawebsite” information sharing are vague and difficult to understand.  Facebook’s interface design is breaking one of the most important website usability rules: make everything easy and clear to your users!

The implication of Facebook’s interface design decisions

What is most troubling about Facebook’s interface design is that it could be a systemic problem plaguing thousands of websites and users. It begs the question: what exactly are the intentions of web designers and how safe is it to trust in the intuitiveness of any interface design?  This is a heated topic that will probably continue to keep internet users on their toes.  For now, it is important to remember that if you are creating a website, the interface design should be simple and usable!  Who knows what the ramifications of Facebook’s latest design changes will be.  Probably nothing.  They seem to own the internet already.

It’s no secret that consumers are flocking to the internet to fulfill their shopping needs. Online shopping has become one of the most popular forms of commerce in the last ten years.  According to Reuters, consumers spent 27 billion dollars online during the 2009 holiday season—and that was only in the United States.  It’s easy to see why eCommerce is so alluring.  In theory, the internet should be a shopper’s paradise—click a few buttons and buy anything you want from the comfort of your own couch. But in reality, online shopping isn’t always such a delightfully efficient experience. No matter how interesting the product or beautiful the graphic design, many consumers lose patience with online shopping sites because they simply aren’t usable.  Usability is the driving force behind eCommerce and if your site isn’t functional due to poor interface design, the consequences can be disastrous for you and your company.

Rendering apps useless can have significant impact on user behavior
Rendering popular apps useless is a surefire usability and user experience annoyance that in today’s super fast real-time web environment could cause serious problems for an app. According to Pinch Media, just 30% of people who buy an iPhone app use it the day after it was purchased. After 20 days less than 5% are actively using it!

Is this quarrel about the usability of third party apps’ interface design?
One might speculate if this recent quarrel has anything to do with usability issues of third-party Facebook apps. It is obvious that especially in the mobile context, the usability of apps is paramount to enabling users to make the most of them. Was Facebook fearing for its reputation? After all, even after the most recent drastic interface design changes, Facebook can be considered an example of good usability and user interface design. Or is it a purely IP-related issue?

With Twitter buying Tweetie to create the first official Twitter app another question remains: could Facebook be hoping to wrest control of the Facebook app market? This would leave fickle users with no other choice than to turn to the official app.

Through prefab interface elements (e.g. radio buttons, links, navigation items, controls etc.) interface designers can create clickable and animated web or software interfaces just in seconds. Without any programming skills, interface designers can focus on the web concept and use cases, site structures and the overall layout of the site, instead of getting lost in details that only matter at a later stage of the project.

Our conclusion of wireframing software: It’s got the look and feel of Rapid Paper Prototyping, but adds interactivity (making wireframes clickable) and accelerates developing speed through re-usable elements and layers. Many (real-time) collaboration features enable interface designers to new ways to work with higher efficiency, leaving more time for the creative process that really counts.

When you conduct an affinity diagramming workshop, make sure the group of participants is smaller than 7 or 8, since it is almost impossible to keep everyone focused (depending on the amount of data the affinity diagramming workshop might even take two sessions) and when working in turns participants must bring some patience until all other members have finished.

Note: When there is a lot of data in a non printable format, ask the participants of your affinity diagramming session to write things down on stick notes, so you split the workload.

After preparing the information and getting the users on board, the next step in affinity diagramming is to put the notes on the whiteboard (or wall), grouping similar content in the same area (do not label it yet). When certain groups of your affinity diagram get too ‘fuzzy’, it might be useful to split a group in various aspects (sub groups) so that you keep the data sets consistent.

When you do the affinity diagramming alone, it might also be usable to work digitally (like with MS Excel or mind mapping tools), but when team work is required, it has proven more effective to work offline with pen and paper.

At some time you will have arranged all sticky notes in groups and may do a quick review of your affinity diagram to make sure everybody agrees on the grouping results. For later processing of the data, now it might be useful to name the groups making them identifiable (or when the data sets represent areas on a website, think about appropriate navigation topics or headlines).

What you get from Affinity Diagramming?

Independent of the data, the purpose and the group of participants, affinity diagramming is a simple and cost effective usability method for extracting and grouping ideas from qualitative data and for obtaining consensus on how information should be structured.

But since the smaller companies in this world do not have such a dominant market position with their websites, it is rather appropriate to close this gap between homepage and the rest of the site. User centered design can help! With thorough concept design (creating clickable wireframes and full specs prototypes) and an iterative design process, where you test and optimize the user centricity from the first prototype to the final delivery of code, you get the idea of what users really want.

User surveys and other studies have shown that even on hardcore shopping sites only roughly 25% of all visitors intend to buy something when visiting a site. Many visitors just come for (price) research or want to get a grip on what products are out there at all, some may even just want to know about the company history or return policy. It is nice when you can convince these people and trigger an impulse to buy something on your site, but this will not be the majority!

In other words with user centered design there is much more to win on the customer’s side than what you would get with just delivering the ‘sign me up’ button all the time. But why first start trying to find out what users really want when thousands of dollars are spent and the site has been launched? It saves you a lot of time and money getting it right from the beginning. Of course user centered design doesn’t replace A/B testing or other on site optimization to find out what drives conversions later on, but with user centered design you start much higher on the ladder than just with designing something ‘beautiful‘ or just focusing on the homepage – unless, of course, you have a standing like Google

Our conclusion of wireframing software: It’s got the look and feel of pen and paper, but adds interactivity (making wireframes animated) and enhances developing speed through re-usable elements and layers. Many (real-time) collaboration modules enable interface designers to new ways to work with higher efficiency, leaving more time for the creative process that really counts.

Wireframing and Real-time Collaboration

The pidoco° wireframe software consists of three main entities which complement each other perfectly. Together, they enhance the interface design process and optimize the general workflow in all stages of interactive web design.

Clickable wireframes are quickly sketched with the Prototype Creator (just by drag&drop) and can later easily be shared and reviewed by colleagues, test users or clients. If there is need for even more in-depth feedback on individual aspects of the web concept, just use the clickable wireframes to perform a one-on-one remote usability test where moderator and test user are connected remotely by a shared screen and an integrated phone. All modules are aimed to increase productivity of the interface design process and ease communication within the team.

Everybody who is into interface prototyping, Rapid Paper Prototyping is old school! But ever considered doing screen design on screen?

With pidoco’s web-based prototyping software, screen designers and web developers can save valuable time, enhance the creative process and build better websites for the WWW.

Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been established as THE way to get a website started. Rapid Paper Prototyping is about sketching ideas with pen an paper to be discussed within the team. This basic screen concept will then be put through a refinement process by incorporating feedback from different stake holders. This paper-built screen will at last act as a guideline for the whole project – from beginning to the end (but is there a real end?). Some web designers even use these basic sketches for performing usability tests. Revealing usability issues in an early stage of development can save a lot of time, since later alterations in the so called ‘finished’ website are minimized.

Anyway, there are disadvantages of Rapid Paper Prototyping.  Paper prototypes are not easy to add to the project documentation and also difficult to share between team-members. Scanning paper prototypes and making them ‘clickable’ for getting the grip on how workflows are reproduced in the design is also a time consuming task as we all know!

That is why many screen designers create their prototypes directly in MS PowerPoint or MS Visio and have them distributed to the relevant sources. True, that way one can share the screens more effectively but it is not really more dynamic than duplicating a piece of paper handing it to the team. The Visio-type static wireframes still do not show the real functionality:  links, dynamic menus and work-flows etc. cannot be reproduced effectively and need to be explained individually in long paragraphs. Again, more time and effort has to be invested to get the message across.

The Pidoco GmbH has spotted this problem and made it their task to tackle it by providing a simple web-based interface design software.