something in the way

A few days ago I found myself in a hotel room outside of Chicago with my 19 year old daughter moaning and sometimes howling in pain. She’d been sick for a week, each day with a new symptom, and this morning her eardrum felt like it was going to burst. We decided that I should cancel my client meeting and take her to an urgent care clinic instead. Of course, we don’t have universal health care here in the States, so first I had to call my insurance provider to find out if there were “in network” doctors we could go to and still be covered by our plan. The insurance company told me to go to a particlar web site,  and said that any doctor we picked through that site would be considered in network.

Using a web site under stress — By now 10 minutes have passed and my daughter is still sitting on the bed behind me moaning and wailing. Instead of helping her, I have to go to a web page and fill out forms and look at maps. The first thing that happens is that I encounter a drop down menu that is meaningless to me:

When I look at this web page now (days later, crisis has passed), it doesn’t seem too confusing, but when I was trying to fill it out, trying to get my daughter some help, the web page was daunting and impossible, and not at all intuitive.

Stress changes your perceptions – Research on stress shows that a little bit of stress (called arousal in psychology terms) can help you perform a task, because it heightens awareness. Too much stress, however, degrades performance. Two psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson first postulated this arousal/performance relationship, and hence it has been called the “Yerkes-Dodson law” for over a century.

Arousal helps up to a point – The law states that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases. Research on the law shows that the amount of stress/arousal that is optimal depends on how difficult the task is. Difficult tasks require less arousal to reach optimal performance, and will start to break down if the arousal level is too high. Simpler tasks require more arousal and don’t fall off as fast.

Tunnel vision — When arousal first goes up then there is an energizing effect, as the person is paying attention. But as the stress increases there are negative effects. Attention gets unfocused, people have trouble remembering, problem solving degrades and “tunnel vision” sets in. Tunnel vision is where you keep doing the same task over and over even though it isn’t working.

Glucocorticoids — More recent research has shown a similar curve when studying the presence of glucocorticoids. These are the hormones that are released when we experience stress, so the Yerkes-Dodson law appears to have direct physical evidence.

Maximum frustration — As I tried to use the web page to find a doctor I kept getting errors, and typical of someone under stress, I kept doing the same task over and over even though it wasn’t working (tunnel vision). At one point I was crying tears of frustration, cursing over the lack of usability of the web site, and upset that I could not just find the name and address of a clinic we could go to.

Patient care, not computer care – I finally turned away from the computer, got my daughter some tylenol, gave her warm washclothes to hold against her ear, and got us both calmed down. Then I found a clinic at the website  (where we went later that day, only to have them say she was fine. By the way, our insurance didn’t work and we had to pay cash after all — i.e., I didn’t need the web site). My daughter is better, and I didn’t even have to cancel the client meeting.

Test under stress – If you might have people using your site when they are under stress, keep in mind that too much stress will change the way they see and use the web site. And here’s a plea to BeechStreet.com… test your website thoroughly assuming that people are tense, stressed, and with howling children in the background. It’s a totally different experience.

If you’d like to read the research —

Yerkes RM, Dodson JD (1908). “The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation”. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology 18: 459–482. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Yerkes/Law/.

Lupien, SJ, Maheu F, Tu M, Fiocco A, Schramek TE (2007). “The effects of stress and stress hormones on human cognition: Implications for the field of brain and cognition”. Brain and Cognition 65: 209–237. PMID 17466428.

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The rapid growth of RIA technology into the lives of every day people just a few years ago has carried both the usability and user experience industries to a new high in popularity. The success of software (particularly on the web) has driven both of these terms into our vernacular, and yet they are still often confused or thought to be synonymous. This post is meant to help those new to the field or unfamiliar with the intricacies of design to understand the differences between the terms.

When you start your own company, there are lots of small decisions that you need to make. What do you splash out on, and what do you pinch pennies on? It’s tricky to decide.

One of the common ways to reduce your initial outlay is to opt for free or low cost software if you can get away with it. For example, maybe you’d consider using a bug tracker like Sifter or Jira, but you’d finally opt for Bugzilla. It’s not pretty, but it’s free – and it has all the features you need.

With a cluttered, unintuitive UI, Bugzilla has a learning curve – but it’s not insurmountable. Plenty of companies use it.

Next on the list for your company is mobile phones. iPhones would be nice, but they’re too expensive. Better to opt for last year’s Windows Mobile handsets, the ones that come free with the contract. You can’t argue with free.

Older versions of Windows Mobile have been widely criticised for poor usability and “toothpick” interaction style, but what the hell – lots of people have learned to live with it. It packs a lot of features in for the price, that’s for sure.

What’s next on the list, then? What about a wiki? Knowledge management is, after all, pretty important. Maybe you could use Confluence or PBworks – they are nicely crafted packages, and not too expensive either. But hey, there are plenty of free solutions out there, like Mediawiki.

Mediawiki may have an interface that only its mother could love, but if it’s good enough for Wikipedia, it’s got to be doing something right.

But let’s stop and think for a moment. Everyone in your company will spend most of their days looking at this software. They’ll probably spend more time looking at these UIs than they spend looking at the faces of their loved ones. Without realising it, you’ve set a standard. You’ve taught everyone in your company that UIs like this are ‘normal’, and are the right way of doing things. When someone needs to design a new advanced search UI, what do they think of immediately? Why, Bugzilla of course. That’s a typical advanced search UI – everyone knows how to use it, right?

Wrong. That’s the classic egocentric fallacy in action, the lynchpin of all bad design: “Other people see the world how I see it, and think how I think. Therefore if I find it easy to use, everyone should be able to.” According to Piaget, humans grow out of this phase at age 7. If only that were true!

You can’t expect all of your staff to be great UI designers. But if you surround them with great UIs, you improve their ability to discern quality, to recognise bad design, and to point the finger and say ‘this doesn’t seem right’.

There are lots of good reasons to use free software, and many more reasons to use open source. Raising the bar for your own UI design is rarely one of them.

I was just editing my settings in Twitter and have ran into a little gem, the one line bio input field. It’s a standard text field used for other things like usernames and emails, and that’s the problem. It’s the same length, too, which makes it very difficult to write out a 160 character line. Here’s a pic:

I can see 21 characters at a time yet the limit is 160, which over 7 times as long. This makes it difficult to see what you’ve typed and difficult to edit because you have to scroll back and forth.

The issue for Twitter is that the bio is meant to be one line, so instead of a text area they chose a text field. The natural thing to do is to change it’s width, which is easy enough with the CSS width property. The better solution in my opinion would be to use a text area, maybe only two or three lines in height. This will communicate that the content has to be brief. Also, if the user does add line breaks, you don’t have to display them in the output on the site — the users should expect this behavior since the field itself is called “one line bio”. Here’s what it would look like:

Making fields larger is usually a non issue since the space right of them is almost always blank, so developers should really spend that extra minute to set correct field sizes (or choose correct field types)  that would be fit for their intended purpose.

Having problems finding the budget for costly usability testing? Here’s your solution.

If your users can solve this CAPTCHA, they will be able to cope with anything you throw at them!

Thanks to James Wragg for the link!