Undo UI

Nothing beats a good undo (unless it's a redo).

My boss showed me Netflix's UI for undoing the removal of a movie from the queue. When the user clicks on the X to remove the movie, the line item greys out with a message that the movie has been removed and an Undo link in the far right column. Clicking the Undo link simply restores the line item for that movie. Gone is the modal window to confirm whether this is really what you wanted to do or not.



The only other examples I've seen so far are from Remember the Milk and Google Gmail which make use of a page-level undo when you remove items from your list or inbox. Instead, Netflix's model uses it as an inline action. Both are fine implementations and I suspect it's an element we can expect to see soon on other sites.

Switching from Firefox to Chrome

On the sole basis of memory usage, I'm switching to Google Chrome--for now. I find that even with only 1 add-on, Firefox uses up about twice as much memory as IE7 and about 3 times as much as Chrome.

Don't get me wrong, I love FF but it just comes down to a matter of productivity. I'm tired of sitting at my computer waiting on processes because of FF acting like a memory hog.

Hopefully FF is able to fix this problem. :(

Mario Kart Love Song (Original)

Trying out the YouTube blog feature.

+1 for YouTube's integrated-with-3rd-party-blog feature. When I come across a cool video, I don't need to spend time copying the embed code, navigating over to my blog, creating a new post, etc. I can just blog straight from the video I'm watching.

Figuring out where to access this feature was the hard part... Sure, it makes sense now, but since I wasn't familiar with all of YouTube's social networking aspects, I was left scratching my head. So for all of you who don't know, it's located under the "Share" section on the video page. Just click on the link to your blog's title and a little blog widget opens up. DUH.

Coming full circle now, here's my recommendation to YouTube: Include copy on the Blog Setup page telling users where they can access this feature. Thanks, the invoice is in the mail!

Geeking Out

Halloween: Dressing up as (badly drawn) wireframes!


Disneyland "work" field trip

Balsamiq Mockups: Sketching Made Digital (Easy)

I came across a neat little app called Balsamiq Mockups that takes some of legwork out of creating quick ideas and sketches. Mockups offers a pre-made library of UI elements to choose from, all using a hand-drawn style intended to keep the design lo-fi. Within a matter of minutes, I was slapping together a rough representation of some faceted navigation, dragging-n-dropping containers, text, and placeholders onto the drawing board area.

My only issues are that I wish it allowed for custom drawn elements and the ability to detach the UI Library onto a second screen. But other than those, very impressed.

IE 7: Where's my refresh button?

So I successfully avoided using IE 7 since it first came out... Until recently, that is. Unfortunately, the Disney IT department doesn't support Firefox (which is jaw-dropping in it's own right) and I've been forced to use Microsoft's excuse for a browser. :( I know this is old news, but here I am discovering things for the first time.

I'm sitting here thinking about the rationale of why IE's UI designers would break apart such a successful cluster of buttons. After the Back button, I imagine Refresh must be a browser's most-clicked button; then Home, Stop, and trailing at the back of the pack would be Forward. Although I never made use of the Favorites button, I noticed it's orphaned in the bottom left corner just before the tabs.



Perhaps it was a strong desire to distinguish themselves from the rest of the browser world by creating a UI which focused less on the traditional buttons approach. Unfortunately, I think they missed the mark.

Thankfully, they kept the text menu cluster intact.

Goodbye IGN...

So it's been awhile since my last post, but things have been up in the air for me career-wise. Suffice it to say there were some organizational changes at IGN and I needed to look for a new job. I'm eager to announce that I'll be a part of the UX team at Disney Parks and Resorts. The biggest factors were the ability to surround myself with folks I could learn from and the close proximity from home. Oh, and because my daughter and niece said it'd be pretty cool. :)

Most of the folks at IGN (and Fox) were great and I hope for their continued success.

Methodology Madness

I attended a panel discussion sponsored by IxDA LA Salon and HUGE in North Hollywood last week. The panel included Jaime Levy Russell of HUGE, Lisa Colvin of Ascentium (was also at the IA Summit), and Jens Jonason of Yahoo.

All three presented slightly different methodologies they used in their work, but I found these repeated throughout:

• Methodologies change depending on the team, project, timeline, budget, technology, etc.
  
• Collaborate and communicate often (to paraphrase Jens, "If you're lucky you'll come up with maybe one good idea, therefore you need these other people to come up with other good ideas.")

The second point is really key, IMHO. Everyone on the team is more or less thinking about the user experience from different perspectives. Instead of trying to guard your territory or think that you've got to come up with all these ideas, borrow from others liberally to make your work better (and probably easier). I think in the past I've tried to own the user experience with an iron fist, but it's just not conducive and makes it much more difficult to build trust with team members.

Is it just eye candy for search?

A colleague sent me a link to the beta version of Searchme's visual search site. I'm pretty impressed (and admittedly it's initially because of the iTunes-style eye candy). It definitely slows down your ability to rifle through search results, but we've learned to specify our search terms by now, right? From what I've gathered through the usability grapevine, users don't go beyond the first page of results.



Upon further use, I've noticed the results which come back aren't as wide as Google's and the keyword filtering seems a little too accurate. For example, using natural language and typing in "how to use a lucky lura at balboa pier" returns no results, but typing in "lucky lura balboa pier" is fine. I think most people probably make use of the latter, but even typing in "lucky lura at balboa pier" doesn't return any results and the only difference is the addition of the word "at". (Maybe I'm using terms which are too obscure, but isn't that what search is for? Ideally you'd want to find exactly what you're looking for, but that's not here yet--for now you just need that scent trail.)

I'd also like to see the results summary for each specific page up front without having to hover over the title at the bottom.

The navigation is simple (click on a site on either side of the main result) or use the slider at the bottom. At the top are filters to narrow your search, a little switch at the bottom allows you to view text and visual results simultaneously, and your keywords are highlighted within the site thumbnail. Dynamic results are also great (why aren't more companies doing this with their data?? Don't force me to go through page reloads!)

Visual search isn't entirely new, but this is the first I've seen that actually communicates results to me in a way that I can understand. Gotta watch this one...

Monetizing headlines

Is this an April Fool's joke that someone forgot to remove? Akin to the "Area Man" t-shirts sold by The Onion, CNN now apparently sells t-shirts based on their headlines. At this point it looks like they're pulled from stories with entertainment value. I'm not sure what to think... it's certainly an interesting move.



A couple other reports...

• http://gawker.com/382150/make-your-own-cnn-t+shirts
• http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzz/CNN_T-Shirts
  

Usability at IGN

I was immediately back in the air after the IA Summit and on my way to San Francisco. It was tiring but I was looking forward to participating in IGN's very first usability test. We would be testing out our brand new video player.

It was a little hectic and wasn't as smooth as I would've liked it to be, but with only a week and a half to prepare and recruit we tried to make the best out of it. Here are some issues we ran into:

• The tasks we came up with were last minute and aligning them with what product wanted wasn't as tight as it could've been. We tried to remedy this by simply adjusting tasks as we went along.


• We started out with a drawing exercise to see if the user could draw or write out their experiences of watching a video. Most kinda fumbled around with this and couldn't quite remember certain features. So the second day we switched to simply getting comments on other popular video sites such as YouTube, CNN, and Gametrailers and found users were able to provide much more general feedback.


• Be prepared--we seemed to be searching for pens, papers, webex wasn't connected, compensation wasn't ready, etc. Next time we'll be prepared!


• I wasn't so sure about having team members (PM, Dev, etc.) in the room with us during sessions. I felt this would distract the user, but we wanted to expose them to usability. We'll probably setup a remote viewing room (Note: we should leverage our video team!)

There were a couple other things but it was mostly administrative stuff that we could've avoided. But all in all I feel we came away with a positive experience--exposing our team to usability, working out some bugs in our process, and coming away with some action items to make improvements to the product.

Welcome to IGN!


The video team out for lunch.


Makeshift usability lab.

Being in an early developmental stage

Dictionary.com defines "budding" as "Being in an early developmental stage."

Even though I've worked as an Interface Designer and Information Architect for a little over 8 years now, I feel my knowledge of user experience (UX) doesn't span so long. I just recently started at a new company and I've come to realize how woefully stagnant I've become from doing the same thing over and over again.

Here are the requirements, churn out some wireframes. Next project.

But I was rejuvenated from attending the IA Summit 2008, inspired by presentations from Luke Wroblewski, Leah Buley, and Dan Brown. I was encouraged personally by Christina Wodtke who went out of her way to invite me into her fold and then asked me to do the same for others, and by Peter Van Dijck who spent time with me discussing online communities and shared advice on following through with some ideas I've had in my head.

So here I set out to grow in knowledge, fill up my toolbox, and, in turn, to encourage and share with others. Budding UX seems an appropriate title.