IDYeah Labs - Concept Contest

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Usability Watch - Tuborg Beer

In pursuit of looking at all dimensions and examples of usability around us (mostly in software world), we're committed to bring you readers some focused reviews and experiences on real-world products. Products that have innovated to achieve a long-lasting user experience. The case in question today is: Tuborg Beer.

I have been a delighted consumer of beer since 1997, and have experienced the taste of many brands over the years. With evolving taste buds and changes in company at the tables, I have shifted loyalties too; some due to geographical constraints of unavailability of few brands. Anyways, no beer has caught my fancy to the extent of a not-so-far-ago launched brand in India - Tuborg, a beer of Denmark. The main reason of my fascination was beyond its soothing mild flavor; it was the usability innovation in its packaging! And it hit me and my close friends that all these years, we'd never "missed" this neat little way of opening the bottle like a beverage can. The very apparatus that makes drinking a beverage in a can more fun and manageable as compared to a bottle, was simply introduced in the bottled drink.



Wow! The expression is also about the experience you get by the sound made. It's not just a convenience about managing without hunting for an opener. It's the ambiance this creates. Almost invisible cold white fumes emitted after a "puckk!" - just setting the tone right, even for teetotalers. And the makers must have known indeed one of the immediate promotion benefits - the strong recall value about this unique mechanism. The word-of-mouth viral effect I hear was very strong, naturally.

A good watch on usability and user experience - from a beer maker (Tuborg).

Thoughts?

We'll be posting similar features, taking on examples of singular products - opining about the user experience. If you wish to contribute any such reviews/experiences, please get in touch - we would love to feature them on our blog, post-moderation of the content.

WATCH THIS SPACE!

Visibility Principle

A user interface is only valued when the user interactions achieve their purpose. The first element of user interaction is what the user sees in the interface. Visibility is all about how clearly the user sees the state of the interface and all the possible actions. If the users cannot "see" how to use the interface, it is not adhering to the visibility principle of user interface design. Let's dive into some real-world examples and then follow-through with web examples.

 

Good visibility - car dashboard that is designed with everything positioned in a way that can be easily found and used.

 

Sleek design in this case compromises usability - auto-faucets have a great advantage of saving water, but its common challenge is "where to put our hands" to ensure timely hand-wash.

Style yes, visibility of main functions - a big NO! One of the most complex wrist-watch dial ever designed.

How many combinations!? Phew!

 

Most straightforward with high visibility - ATM.

Over to few web examples:

• google


• dropbox


• business catalyst


• high rise


• fidelity


• acosmin


• justdial

Employ commonsensical ideas like highlighting important parts of your web page on top center, avoiding dead-ends, and always suggesting users the 3 answers: "where he is", "what there is", and "where can he go next".

Suggestions?

Case Study: Reaching Wider Audience with Enhanced Visibility

Background

Founded in 2005 with 3 partners, Vector Consulting Group is now the leading player in the area of Theory of Constraints consulting in India and South East Asia. Vector employs TOC philosophy to bring about quantum jump in performance of organizations in its target industry clusters. They partner with clients till they realize the targeted benefits.

Web marketing being inexpensive, yet sophisticated and effective if done right – made Vector hunt for a suitable vendor in IDYeah Creations to relook at their corporate branding and communications through public domain: web site.

Challenge

Vector’s main objective behind its recent site revamp was to position the company as the leader in the space of “Theory of Constraints” based management consulting. Vector’s key differentiator from competitors is their array of “guiding principles” on which they base their business operations:  Benefits Sharing; Ownership of Results; Trust; and Respect for the Individual.

In order to successfully convey the Vector way of messaging, it was essential that the new site design maintain a steady balance between both the “serious” consulting and the “innovative” engagement aspects of Vector’s services and products.

IDYeah worked with Vector Consulting Group’s founder members to keep the overall tone and structure of site content in line with the corporate brand and offerings strategy. From a design perspective, IDYeah established a consistently innovative visual tone for the site that could be complemented with various graphic elements to infuse a much-needed dynamism without losing the overall intent – of connecting better with the visitors and inspiring trust and confidence as a brand.

Launched in June 2009, the new web site clearly establishes Vector as the leader in its category and provides web site visitors with company, solutions, and industry information that is structured for easy access to the content that they seek.

User & Task Analysis

IDYeah’s User Profiling and Task Analysis served as the foundation for the establishment of the global site architecture and use case workflows. The range of user needs for access to information (i.e. CIO seeking consulting case studies vs. CTO seeking product features) required a detailed “user to task” analysis exercise to determine what online functionality was most valuable to each identified user type. By focusing on functionality and key features for particular user groups, IDYeah was able to identify and quantify at a granular level the key tasks and valued content areas across a wide range of Vector’s site visitors.

Expert Evaluation

 

• Top Navigation not prominent


• Industry clusters/focus not visible


• Logo and symbol eating up precious real estate on screen


• Not scalable to accommodate increasing number of case studies


• Not scalable to highlight the authored media materials on the competence and success stories


• Overall tone and structure either leaving the visitor without much information or taking repeated and prolonged efforts


• Visual appeal of a leader in its space missing


• Corporate logo and product logos not consistent and progressive


• Over-design and excessive use of Flash – hampering the effectiveness of SEO

Information Architecture

Vector’s priority requirement in establishing the information architecture for site content areas was to establish clear, visitor-specific paths to site information. To achieve the balance between product/service promotion and communication of expertise, IDYeah created a meaningful taxonomy for the site that divided the information into 3 Industry Clusters to help direct the users to relevant content. In tandem with developing the site architecture, IDYeah also developed a crisp information workflow on the Home page providing information seekers with an “at-a-glance” reference to core space and expertise of Vector. Per Industry cluster, following workflow was suggested, designed, and implemented:



 

IDYeah Creations employed DesignWave Consultancy as the Design Partner and Inkey Solutions as the Technology Partner to arrive at the desired outcome.

User Interface Design

 


 
After generating wireframes on the initial concept, and having them in place, IDYeah began applying visual design treatments to the UI foundation to create a look and feel that would support Vector’s repositioning goals. An initial set of digital mockup directions that spanned a range of tone and attitude. From this set, a single direction was chosen and refined to become the new outline face of Vector.

Benefits

• Strong re-branding and re-positioning


• Increased site traffic and qualified set of business inquiries


• Platform for sharing expertise through expert literature


• Improved in-bound marketing and sales

Staying Live with SAP

You cast off all legacy systems and installed SAP; SAP ties it all together – but it costs. And did you achieve answers to your problems? Or are you contemplating to look for an alternative, because the migration introduced new problems?

ERP-centric companies are missing out on the full potential of a solution as rich as SAP, because they are failing to appreciate the implications – and continuing to make the mistakes of traditional systems development and integration. SAP implementation projects are suffering from ‘undue focus’ on technology, lack of user interface, lack of attention to human and organizational needs, lack of evaluation, and very little integrated working – internally between systems.

Measuring RoI is an essential prerequisite of any IT investment today. But the big problem is that it is far from quantifiable. And if the investment is as huge as an SAP implementation, the aforementioned problem becomes magnified. Spending on IT is no longer identified as an expense, but as an investment. And RoI is based on cash flow analysis. It is also true that management, and not technology, will ensure success or failure. Integration of business objectives with IT solutions succeeds only when management if committed to ensure a smooth transition of change management. “Leveraging staff and current investment” is the biggest faced challenge.

Most commonly posed questions:

• Can we reuse current investment?


• Can we simplify increasingly complex business processes?


• Can we increase productivity?


• Can we lower maintenance costs?

Until the early nineties, the relationship between an organization’s investment in IT and its impact on the performance and productivity was never seriously measured. Perhaps, the most critical reason was one’s inability to segregate the benefits based on ‘Deployment of IT’ vis-à-vis ‘Deployment of robust processes.’ Only if an organization has the latter approach to an SAP implementation, will it see the value and reap the benefits in the longer run. In accordance with the above approach, it must be added that SAP demands a fundamental change in the processes followed by business and the people who work those processes.

Change, being painful by nature, discourages many to take the second approach. However, if you install SAP as software without changing the ways people do their jobs, you may not see any value at all – and the new software (SAP) could slow you down by simply replacing the old legacy software that everyone was used to. On the other hand, if you are able to use SAP to improve ways your people take orders, manufacture goods, fill timesheets, for example, you will see value from it.

SAP, in spite of being one of the largest and most successful vendors of enterprise resource planning (ERP), ironically is a misnomer. For one, it DOES NOT help your planning. Resource – and the ownership of that resource in any business – is a hazy term. What is right about it is the enterprise part. It successfully integrates all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that serves the particular needs of different departments. Organizations opting for SAP as their ‘back-office software’ have one or more of the following reasons – to integrate financial information; integrate customer order information; standardize and speed up core business processes – manufacturing, financial services – but whatever be the case; reduce inventory, non-performing assets – as the case may be; and standardize HR information.

Business benefits aside, SAP as an ERP delivers well on three necessary objectives – consistency and reliability of data across the organization; streamlined transaction processing; and operations-level reporting.

Which is a better approach – Going for an ERP vendor like SAP or going for specialized point products? Opinions vary, based on a survey of several successes and failures in either case. Important is to base your evaluation on your business case, the strength of transaction processing backbone, and the desired room for sophistication. At times, an ERP like SAP is not able to handle a function vital for the company. In such cases, a specialized third-party product can be interfaced to deliver the result. For example, Mohan Breweries and Distilleries Ltd implemented SAP R/3; they found that they needed far superior functionality in the insurance area. They opted for IVL’s iNSUR/3, a comprehensive add-on package with SAP R/3 ERP solution that addresses the needs of enterprises in the areas of insurance and claims management. The company was able to authenticate information on numerous critical data of the insurance processes and cut down nearly 50% of excess manpower costs. It could increase the efficiency of the supply chain by integrating the routine insurance related activities into SAP R/3 Business Framework.

SAP is generic enough to cater to 24+ industries. As much as this being a strong point in favor, it introduces a major limitation – Usability! And this compromise cannot be escaped from, internally. The reason is commonsensical – in making itself applicable to diversified industries, diversified processes, SAP was forced to provide innumerable data elements packaged logically in discrete screens and transactions; terminology used on-screen is also generic in nature for the same reason. Following table captures the common ‘effects’ faced by most customers, and the ‘causes’ leading to those symptoms.

EFFECTS

• Tedious and error-prone data entry


• Users spending more time on SAP than their primary tasks


• Steep learning curve


• High costs in training and re-training

CAUSES

• UI peppered with inconsequential data elements


• SAP by nature is more transaction-driven than process-driven


• Complex and excessive navigation to perform a task


• Imprecise and confusing terminology for your industry

Whatever industry you are in, “it’s all about productivity!” Productivity suffers if end-users are not comfortable with ‘what they see’ on screen and ‘how they interact’ with the screen. SAP evolution from R/2 to R/3 to Frogdesign look (EnjoySAP) has made a conscious effort to bring home better usability. However the spectrum traversed on this front is and is going to be limited because of the earlier mentioned fact – the generic nature.

Better usability can be achieved by internal and/or external customization and consolidation. For example, ABAP, the architectural language of SAP, can be used to re-configure, modify UI screens based on specific business process needs. Similarly, an external program (third-party) may be used to integrate with SAP in order to better the user experience. Or a combination of both! Important factors helping evaluate the approach are captured in the following points.

The solution:

SHOULD NOT

• change the underlying business logic of SAP


• incur extra overhead in terms of heavy maintenance and upgrade costs


• reduce system performance


• affect data integrity

SHOULD

• increase productivity and efficiency


• minimize or eliminate training and maintenance costs


• allow users to focus on their primary tasks


• provide flexibility in terms of deployment and configuration

For example, Rexam Beverage Can Americas implemented SAP R/3 to use its PM (Plant Maintenance) module for mapping their processes, for example – creating a maintenance work order; releasing the work order; and printing the work order – all of which they wanted to happen within 30 seconds. The Plant Manager of Rexam, New Jersey, Mr. Steve Foster and his team of professionals, during SAP training, found the interface neither simple enough nor fast enough to enable what they had in mind. “We had this idea of creating a maintenance system that looked like an ATM (automated teller machine),” says Foster. “No one’s ever been trained on how to run an ATM, yet everyone can use one. Why should it be any more difficult to create a work order in SAP?”

Foster and team found what they needed in a then little known product called GuiXT (software bundled within SAP R/3), developed by Synactive GmbH. With the help of a Synactive consultant, a Rexam programmer was able to use GuiXT to create an SAP PM interface that does, in fact, resemble an ATM in its simplicity. The basic menu screen contains just 10, touch-screen, function push buttons, each of which triggers a series of standard SAP functions that run in the background, but are transparent to the user. In some cases, a single button launches SAP transactions that would have otherwise required the user to navigate 12 to 15 separate screens using standard SAP interface, Foster says.



The result, according to Foster, is that Rexam training requirements for the SAP PM system were cut from an estimated 40 hours per machine operator – which would have been required using a standard SAP interface – to 4 hours with the simplified GuiXT enabled SAP interface. Multiplied times the 1,500 plant operators who would be using the system, that’s a savings of 54,000 hours. “We more than recovered the cost of GuiXT license in the training savings alone,” Foster observes. Moreover, the simplicity of GuiXT interface enabled Rexam to largely meet the 30-second goal for its users. “I’d say we’re hitting that 30-second goal about 80% of the time, and for the other 20%, it’s less than 45 seconds,” Foster notes.

Conceptually, from a CIO’s perspective, the perfect system would be one in which one could reuse invested software, describe software architecture so that a non-expert could successfully execute and simplify complex business modeling, and automate user tasks – all of the above with no or least maintenance.

Can you find or build one? Are you willing to Change?

 

Boorish behavioral patterns

To many coders, application development is the more glamorous part of software development, as compared to building the user interface for the same. What most of coders ignore however, is that to the end-user, the user interface IS the system. And what most end-users want is a system, which is functional, intuitive, easy to use and has sensible defaults. Humans during their evolution from cavemen to the current society have come up with a number of rules, governing various aspects of social behavior. These are the rules that are commonly referred to as social manners. We argue that a large number of the behavioral patterns classified as “good manners” apply to software application interfaces also. Consequently, user interface designers who tend to ignore “good manners” run the risk of making their applications as bad or rude software citizens.

But what are good manners? Simply put, good manners can be summarized as show consideration, respect and care for others.  It is somewhat surprising then that, whereas most of the creators of various software and web applications are well behaved and possess good social ettiquettes, some of their creations are truly rude and obnoxious in their interactions with end-users. It seems that many computer applications do not follow the basic tenets of social interactions which are common knowledge. The disconcerting fact is that some of the usability issues that underly such rude behavior has been identified and understood for decades.

Some examples of rude interfaces are summarized below:

1. Irrevocable Steps: This typically refers to instances when the system decides to take some irrevocable steps, with or without user consent. Automatically applying patches and rebooting the system is a concrete example. This is seen on windows environments, wherein the OS is configured to automatically download some patch from windows update without informing/intimating the user, and after the patch is installed, auto-rebooting the system. This is the physical equivalent of your futuristic car deciding to clean itself, suddenly change directions from your current destination to the carwash, throwing all the users out of the car and washing itself.


2. Pushy Behavior: Application developers want end-users to use their software as much as possible. But when their desire to promote their software to desktop users translates to the software adding itself in a number of places, including the startup menu, desktop icon, task bar, right click context menu and changing the default application for a number of file types to use itself, it can be termed as pushy behavior. Real player, and before that Paint Shop Pro was notorious for such behavior.


3. Pot calling Kettle black: While doing application design, it is the responsibility of the programmer to not just anticipate, but even expect incorrect inputs from the end-users, who often are not technically savvy. In a lot of cases, however, instead of designing the software to be robust and fault tolerant, the programmers blame the end-users via vague and rude error messages. An example of such is when the application attempts to confirm some obvious condition from the end-user eg - The infamous DOS error Abort, Retry, Fail?


4. Cryptic error messages: The HTTP status codes comprise of a list status codes that webservers return as a response for any HTTP request. In fact, all the HTTP status codes are very terse and to-the-point, but what is more puzzling is when website designers directly throw these cryptic error messages to end users. A very common example is, when a web server throws a “404 - page not found” error. It is fairly trivial for the website designers to put out a more graceful error message, or even re-direct it to a generic error page having a more polite error message.


5. Threatening error messages: These are error messages that threaten the end-user with some sort of destructive behavior (typically data loss). That this is a very rude behavioral pattern for the application goes without saying, but what is worse is that the programmer has anticipated the condition that causes this error message, and instead of fixing the root cause, added a threatning error message to the end-user. eg - “Continuing with the operation may cause permanent data loss and cannot be undone. Yes/No?”


6. Contract breaker: Windows GUI applications (typically) have a contract with the end-user that exiting the main window will close the applications. Applications that fall in this category satisfy the exit contract but keep running in the background hogging memory or CPU. Adobe is a prime example of such behavior.

We will be exploring some more such examples and analyzing their underlying patterns in upcoming posts. Please watch this space for more details.

Simplicity Principle

SIMPLICITY.

We saw few examples and points on one of the principles of user interfaces - structure. This features focuses on Simplicity.

Why do you need your site to be simple?

Site visitors will rarely visit your site to "enjoy" the design. The design should be very transparent and complementary to the content. From the visitor's point of view, the best design is pure text that echoes the content they're looking for. Nobody really has the time and patience to interpret your design. Remember, the complexity and abstractness that some design concept introduces does not command any appreciation for the hard work that's perhaps gone into creating the design. Strive for simplicity - easy to comprehend layout and text.

How can you achieve simplicity in your web site?

The idea is to achieve a perfect blend of details and their presentation on screen.

• Use graphics sparingly and meaningfully; also make sure it's light on size.


• If short text is sufficient, avoid having complex wordings. For ex: Use "Search" instead of "Quick Keyword Search" for your search functionality.


• Use suggestive and direct icons that are consistent with web terminology and use less space on screen.


• Use colors and fonts sparingly.


• Do not use jarring animations and advertisements.


• White/Blank Space is underrated; use it effectively.


• Use elements that work consistently across all browsers (HTML + CSS); avoid elements that cause issues across different environments (JavaScript, Flash).

Few examples of Simple web sites:

• blejskam


• enso


• artypapers


• distinct


• symphony cms


• opened hand


• jgm


• open communications

KISS philosophy has been around since the dawn of web site design. KISS does not mean boring and dull sites. It is possible to create great looking sites and still keep it simple using simple techniques, as exemplified in the above list of sites. Concept of simplicity is more complex than it may seem; but achievable.

Stay on for more discussions and examples on principles of user interfaces.