David John Mead

Labels & Proximity: A real-world user fail

Being good citizens we try and recycle as much as we can. Every Saturday, and sometimes Sunday, we make the trip down to the Recycling area to drop off our collected plastic, cardboard, and paper.

Recently some of the bins have been replaced (were they recycled?) with newer ones. So 5 shiny new metal bins arrived - four red and one grey. Red ones replacing the ones for plastics and the grey was an additional one for cardboard etc. The reason for the long set-up is this Sunday we dutifully went and I saw the grey bin overflowing with plastic.

Now on Saturday it was virtually empty and only myself and one other put a few bits of cardboard in there (We both did a double-check).  So what made others fill it with plastic?  One idea I had is the lack of good signs.  The most dominant is the supplier of the bin.  Can you see which one tells you what to place here?  You can click through and see it larger on Flickr.  All the other new red bins have the same stickers, placed almost identically too.

Also the proximity to the other new bins.  All of them were placed together at the same time.  So people must have made the assupmtion that if all the new bins are for plastics, then this must be for plastic too, regardless of it being a vastly different color – and no one read the signs as they all look the same.

What went wrong?

Could you blame the users? Aren’t they just being lazy? Well I don’t think so.  In the 8 months or so that we’ve been recyclying here I’ve never seen bins filled with anything that shouldn’t have been there.  And as I mentioned, I had to double check too.

Could you blame the company? Could they have better signage? Sure, but they want their customers to know who supplied the bins, so they will contract them in the future.  That’s their objective.

Why am I rambling on about this and tagged the post web? Well these are the sorts of things that I think about when doing wireframes or page designs for web sites.

• Are visitors going to find the new thing on the old page?
• Have you made it different enough?
• Is the visitor going to get frustrated?
• Does the page serve all audiences?

So it’s important to not only look to see if you are labelling items on the page clearly, but that you are cognisant of what is around them on the page, especially if this is an existing page that you are adding new content to.

Are Web2.0 sites dropping like flies?

So only after updating my Google profile did I notice that two more sites/services have gone the way of the Dodo.

Resolio was an online resume builder that used the hResume microformat and let you store & publish your resume online.  I found it a good service and used it to create my resume for my interview at Progressive.

Swurl was a life streaming site I wrote about before that had a nice way to present your content.  The owners now have another project to do with eBay search running in its place.

I suppose its time for someone to come up with a web-troika site to track the existence of all the web2.0 aggregators out there.

Technorati tags: web2.0, closing

Twitter’s big announcement?

There’s been quite the buzz around Twitter for the past couple of weeks and apparently tomorrow (well, today as I type this very late) is going to be a “very big day“. Now that could mean anything from Oprah is now using it to they’ve sold out to Google or Facebook and its being closed down.

My hunch is going to be about funding or the unveiling of a revenue/advertising model.

One things for sure. Since the announcement the Doug Bowman was leaving Google and joining Twitter there’s been a ramp up on the look and feel of the site. Subtle changes depending on users and even where you are logging in from.

I first started noticing a small box giving tips and insights about Twitter and the culture of “tweeting”.  Is this a foreshadowing of where we can expect to see advertising go?

As I don’t visit the site much (I use tweetdeck) I’ve been making a point to login from time to time to see if anything else was being changed.

First the pagination at the bottom of the page was replaced by a “more” bottom which expand the list of tweets. Another little bit of Javascript goodness I noticed is the post notification that appears at the top of the screen.

All the other major tweaks have been happening in the right side bar.  Look at the differences between my page and @jules23’s, taken seconds apart. She has a little indicator on what section she is looking at as well as a search box and trending topics.

Today I noticed that the information in the sidebar has been condensed even further. Updates, Favorites, and Following are the only three options there.

Hopefully the announcement will clear up some of the rumors and we’ll able to see where all this current iterations will take us.

Technorati tags: twitter, announcement, changes, ui, design

The expectancy of information…

One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is when do I, as a user, expect to have a piece of information presented to me.

Take, as an example, driving along the freeway. I see signs for the different gas stations that I could use. What would be nice (my expectancy) is seeing how much they are selling their gas for on those signs. For me this is making my decision to leave the freeway now or wait until the next exit easier.

Now technically this is possible, but is it in the best interests of the gas station? No, obviously. They want you off the freeway because you are more likely to fill up, regardless of price, than get back on and try again.

It’s a balancing act that we online folks have to go through all the time when creating sites and experiences.

When paying bills online you generally receive an email reminder. Do I expect the amount to be shown in the email or when I log in? And if it is when I log in, should it be the first thing I am presented with?

For me, the expectancy is showing the amount in the email. For the company it could be after logging in. They may want to show/sell me something else or maybe they are not allowed to show that information in something as unsecure as email.

Instead of leaving it there though, I find I’m thinking about the next level of expectancy for the user – If you cannot show the amount due, are they expecting to be presented with a reason why?

Next time you’re designing something, think about your users “expectancy of information” one or two steps further along than normal.

That old Hammer feel…

British band Kasabian have a new single out called “Vlad The Impaler”. They offered a free download of it from their website this month for a couple of days. Its a pretty good song, and even though the deadline has passed you can still see the video up at the site.

Kasabian – Vlad the Impaler from Kasabian on Vimeo.
It really captures the look and feel of the Hammer Horror films I remember watching late at night. Very cool.