1. Visibility of system status — The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
2. Match between system and the real world — The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
3. User control and freedom — Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked emergency exit to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
4. Consistency and standards — Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.
5. Error prevention — Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
6. Recognition rather than recall — Minimise the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use — Accelerators — unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design — Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
9. Help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors — Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
10. Help and documentation — Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.

References

• http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html
• Nielsen, J. (1994b). Heuristic evaluation. In Nielsen, J., and Mack, R.L. (Eds.), Usability Inspection Methods, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a process used for decades to create new solutions for companies and organisations. HCD can help you enhance the lives of people. This process has been specially-adapted for organisations like that work with people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. HCD will help you hear people’s needs in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.

The Toolkit is divided into four sections that can be downloaded individually or together:

1. The Introduction will give an overview of HCD and help you understand how it might be used alongside other methods.
2. The Hear guide will help your design team prepare for fieldwork and understand how to collect stories that will serve as insight and inspiration. Designing meaningful and innovative solutions that serve your customers begins with gaining deep empathy for their needs, hopes and aspirations for the future. The Hear booklet will equip the team with methodologies and tips for engaging people in their own contexts to delve beneath the surface.
3. The Field Guide and Aspirations Cards are a complement to the Hear guide; these are the tools your team will take with them in order to conduct research.
4. The Create guide will help your team work together in a workshop format to translate what you heard from people into frameworks, opportunities, solutions, and prototypes. During this phase, you will move from concrete to more abstract thinking in identifying themes and opportunities and back to the concrete with solutions and prototypes.
5. The Deliver guide will help catapult the top ideas you have created toward implementation. The realisation of solution includes rapid revenue and cost modeling, capability assessment, and implementation panning. The activities offered in this phase are meant to complement your organisation’s existing implementation processes and may prompt adaptations to the way solutions are typically rolled out.

Download the complete toolkit (PDF, 30.5MB)

The list is still as relevant today as it was back in 1997.

1. Know thy user, and YOU are not thy user.
2. Things that look the same should act the same.
3. Everyone makes mistakes, so every mistake should be fixable.
4. The information for the decision needs to be there when the decision is needed.
5. Error messages should actually mean something to the user, and tell the user how to fix the problem.
6. Every action should have a reaction.
7. Don’t overload the user’s buffers.
8. Consistency, consistency, consistency.
9. Minimize the need for a mighty memory.
10. Keep it simple.
11. The more you do something, the easier it should be to do.
12. The user should always know what is happening.
13. The user should control the system. The system shouldn’t control the user. The user is the boss, and the system should show it.
14. The idea is to empower the user, not speed up the system.
15. Eliminate unnecessary decisions, and illuminate the rest.
16. If I made an error, let me know about it before I get into REAL trouble.
17. The best journey is the one with the fewest steps. Shorten the distance between the user and their goal.
18. The user should be able to do what the user wants to do.
19. Things that look different should act different.
20. You should always know how to find out what to do next.
21. Don’t let people accidentally shoot themselves.
22. Even experts are novices at some point. Provide help.
23. Design for regular people and the real world.
24. Keep it neat. Keep it organized.
25. Provide a way to bail out and start over.
26. The fault is not in thyself, but in thy system.
27. If it is not needed, it’s not needed.
28. Color is information.
29. Everything in its place, and a place for everything.
30. The user should be in a good mood when done.
31. If I made an error, at least let me finish my thought before I have to fix it.
32. Cute is not a good adjective for systems.
33. Let people shape the system to themselves, and paint it with their own personality.
34. To know the system is to love it.

References

1. Lund, A. M. (1997). Expert ratings of usability maxims. Ergonomics in Design, 5(3), 15-20. A study of the heuristics design experts consider important for good design.

But what makes up a web community; what makes them successful? Below I discuss the four C’s of community: Content, Context, Connectivity and Community.

Content

A current meme when organising or building a website is the catchphrase Content is King. A big shift in the web in recent years has been the way websites are constructed. Today it’s a necessity, and indeed best practice, to separate form from content. In one hand you have the compelling content, whilst in the other you have the presentation, be it in the form of HTML and CSS, Flash or RSS, amongst others.

Quality content is one way in which you can make your website stand out. It is also a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping build. When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from; for example community driven or syndication? Does it provide indisputable value; does it have a unique selling point (USP)? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained? Even pre-Web 2.0 initiatives have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant.

Web accessibility and search engine optimisation are also vital, so having content completely separated from presentation means a number of assistive technologies can make better use of the content, whilst the web robots can also readily consume the information.

Context

Context means understanding how people use your website, where they are in the user-journey and serving them the right experience at the right time. Well-designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context.

For example, FriendFeed‘s iPhone version, which is simply a re-worked web interface, is perfectly designed for contextual usage on the go. Similarly, Remember The Milk updates the interface explicitly for mobile and iPhone users, whilst also syndicating the content to applications such as Google Calendar. (It is questionable whether user-agent switching is good practice, but that is a whole new blog post.) Conversely, Delicious makes no attempt at changing the user interface for iPhone or Nokia N95 users since the iPhone and N95 have full web-capabilities through their respective web browsers.

In some instances the context in which the content is displayed will require reduced functionality. For example, the Last.fm mobile site does not allow you to play music, but simply search music listings, view recommendations, events and friend listings, and edit settings. However, through its API, Last.fm is able to offer its data and platform to third party developers to aid the building of new applications and communities, thus changing its context.

Connectivity

Connectivity is the ability of a system, whether that is a web-based community or a device like the iPhone, to connect with little or no modification. In the realm of communities, the ability to easily connect to your peers is the Holy Grail of the application.

Successful communities thrive on fluid, hard-to-measure activities that are, in the purest sense, relationship-based. It’s not all about mass communications — although Twitter and YouTube are both bucking this trend — but more about the micro-interactions. Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means that the community is able to function, unhindered, almost indefinitely. Facebook lends itself expertly to micro-interactions through the user’s ‘wall’.

Companies are turning to communities as the new customer relationship management (CRM), but this requires people to mind them. Organisations such as 37Signals and WildBit very effectively use Twitter to broadcast service updates and sometimes apologies, whilst the BBC and The Guardian online use it to broadcast links to new content.

Continuity

People often don’t like change, but communities that thrive often do so though evolution to meet the needs of users. Communities need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained. Too much of a radical change will almost certainly have a detrimental impact upon visits, at least initially.

Building communities is the new marketing for a brand, whether that is through wholely-owned properties or 3rd party social media services such as Twitter, WordPress or Ning. The starting point to any community is finding a niche that is currently underserved and serving that community better than anyone else. But Brands need to know a few things before they head down the community path. The web is saturated with communities. Some are thriving, while others have come and gone. Creating a community is not like your average marketing campaign that you can ditch it is a failure. If the community is successful the four C’s of content, contect, connectivity and continuity will have to be maintained and indeed, developed.

Human behaviour flows from three main sources: desire, emotion and knowledge

Desire lines are those well-worn ribbons of dirt that you see cutting across a patch of grass, field or park, often with nearby pavements, particularly those that offer a less direct route, ignored. In winter, desire lines appear spontaneously as trampled down paths in the snow. These paths are never perfectly straight but instead, they meander like a river this way and that, as if to prove that desire itself isn’t uniform or linear and (literally, in this case) straightforward. Desire Lines show that it is human to choose, but it is also human to choose what other people have chosen before. Be it for establishing a pattern, be it for convenience, or be it for not reinventing the wheel. In this way the Desire Lines become well-trodden and pseudo-permanent routes to a particular destination.

Desire Lines are the ultimate unbiased expression of natural human purpose

The term ‘Desire Lines’ originates from the field of urban planning in the early 20th Century.

An optimal way to design pathways in accordance to natural behaviour is not to design them at all

Extending the concept to websites

Broadening the concept of Desire Lines, it is also possible to see other impressions of human desire in websites, many of which can provide a commercial advantage to the particular website in question.

The web phenomenon is simply another way people find entertainment, communicate and interact. Whether the purpose of using the web is for enjoyment or employment, Desire Lines are are a such perfect expression of natural human intention that they become the utlimate design pattern for building successful and intuitive websites. It is easy to envisage users like an army of ants moving in single file towards their goal, not following set paths, but bypassing the planned route directly towards the news article, the video, indeed any product being offered by the website concerned.

Instead of websites providing classic access points via menus and taxonomies, they can employ different access points based upon user preferences and previous browsing history. This is heavily dependent upon capturing user’s details via a cookie or a login system, like at Amazon, but the benefits to the user can be far more rewarding.

So who is doing this?

Understanding the demographics of your users and your site usage is key to Desire Lines. The BBC website is a great example whereby search statics are monitored frequently. They adapt their web user interface and site structure based upon what people are typing into their search box thus making it easier for subsequent users to view the more relevant or interesting stories of the day.

Amazon makes Desire Lines more explicit and beneficial to their users through Listmania, recommendations, Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought, What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing Items Like This?, Better Together, Recently Viewed Items, Wish Lists etc. In essence, Amazon does not provide a single standard way of finding an item, but relates each item together through a myriad of historic information from its user community. The user therefore has the option to search for an item, use the catagories, or click on links and begin their own desired user journey, which can be uniquely distinct from other users journeys or a mirror of those journeys.

Current TV takes the concept even further by showing content that is purely based upon what users want, or what they term as viewer-created content. Current slice the schedule into short segments into “pods” — each just a few minutes long. These pods profile interesting people on the rise, intelligence on trends as they spring up around us, and international news from new perspectives. Anyone who wants to contribute can upload a video. Then, everyone in the Current online community helps decide what should be on TV. You can join in at either stage — watch & vote or make video.

Limitations to Desire Lines

A key limitation, or possibly a challenge, to the successful adoption of Desire Lines concerns advertising revenues. For a user it is beneficial to be able to reached the desired destination as quickly and efficiently as possible, but for a website’s advertising revenue it certainly is not. To be simplistic and possibly cynical, many sites don’t want users to have an overly efficient experience as this limits page views and page impressions. The challenge, therefore, is to retain users on the website and provide them more relevant information and targeted advertising.

There are also implications on what is considered more relevant and what is not. The BBC to some extent decides based upon user searches, but this serves also to hide potentially captivating an important stories. One user’s preference isn’t necessarily the next’s, therefore creating an information bias. This may be even more problematic with our over-reliance on Google for finding information. The Google algorithms essentially decide what we find even though we are told that the sites listed are based upon relevance and popularity.

Finally, you can’t pave every desire line. To do so would end in a playing field not covered in lush green grass with a few tracks intersecting the green, but a concrete mess.

To solve a myriad of today’s problems, modern web applications must be able to solve an equal myriad of requirements.  These requirements provide the principles behind the emerging Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and include some, if not all, of the following.

1. Run unchanged across multiple platforms
2. Deliver engaging user interfaces with high levels of interactivity
3. Restore processing power and rendering capabilities to the client
4. Execute well across varying connection speeds (broadband rather than the  archaic dial-up)
5. Utilise audio, video, images and textual content in a seamless mannor
6. Support mobile workflow by allowing users to work on- and off-line
7. Allow the client to decide what content should be accessed and when that content should be retrieved (asynchronous execution)
8. Access any number of middle-tier services (e.g. .NET, Java, ColdFusion) and data stores
9. Provide powerful and dynamic user interfaces
10. Use standards such as XML-RPC, SOAP and REST in Web Services-based applications
11. Integrate with legacy applications
12. Allow for incremental addition of functionality to enhance the Web application environments
13. Be accessible to all
14. and, Utilise ubiquitous content

Candidate technologies for these solutions are developing primarily in the form of AJAX, Flex/Flash and XAML. They do not simply address the limitiations of the page based model as seen in Web 1.0, but provide the above capabilities whilst also empowering developers and designers to create new kinds of engaging and innovative applications and user experiences.

We are in a period of expanding opportunity for Internet and intranet applications. The growth in adoption and usage of the Internet has acted as a driver behind technology spending, spawned such terms as Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Web Services, and enterprise integration trends that seek to combine back-office infrastructures with new front-office applications and the Internet.

Integral to this is the need to communicate better with employees, customers, suppliers, and partners. Intranet applications, including enterprise information portals and employee facing applications, are increasingly depended upon to share information across a company, while outwardly focused extranet applications seek to more tightly bind networks of partners, suppliers and customers and make communication, business transactions and support easier.

A key reason Web applications cannot represent these types of complexity is because of the limitations of HTML pages. The Internet grew up on the notion of a network of loosely coupled, unintelligent clients that communicate with increasingly intelligent servers by sending requests for pages. The emergence of Rich Internet Applications (RIA‘s) has served to blur the distinction between the desktop and the Web and has resulted in smart, powerful and dynamic user interfaces. RIA‘s seek to combine the best of the desktop, Web and communication technologies.

As one would expect, the driving forces behind Rich Internet Applications are the big guns in the technology and Web industry; namely Adobe, Google and Microsoft. Each company has produced their own RIA platforms:

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA‘s.

Applications can be built using the following technologies:

• Flash / Flex / ActionScript
• HTML / JavaScript / CSS / AJAX
• Combination of these technologies
• PDF can be leveraged with any application

Adobe Integrated Runtime can be found at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Google Gears

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.

Google Gears consists of three modules that address the core challenges in making web applications work offline.

• LocalServer Cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally
• Database Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• WorkerPool Make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously

Google Gears can be found at http://gears.google.com

Micrsoft Silverlight

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

Microsoft Silverlight can be found at http://silverlight.net