Archive for the ‘User experience’ Category

Quick thoughts on card sorting

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I attended a half-day card sorting tutorial this morning run by Syntagm at the HCI 2009 conference in Cambridge. I thought I'd scribble down some quick thoughts about what I learned before I forget.

It provided a good overview of card sorting methodologies. On paper card sorting might sound like a very basic activity (here are some cards with words on them, now put the cards in related groups), but of course there's more to it than that, particularly at the analysis stage. I must admit I started glazing over when advanced statistical analysis was being discussed, but there's no point doing this at all if you don't know how to analyse your results.

The level of analysis you do of course will depend on your resources and the size of the project. There are dedicated software packages available which will do the analysis for you (including one produced by Syntagm), but you can also just do it in a spreadsheet. There's a template card sorting spreadsheet on Boxes and Arrows which I've yet to look at but which may well be very useful. Donna Spencer has also recently written a book on the subject: Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories (Rosenfield, 2009) which I haven't seen but was recommended to us (with some caveats which I won't go into here).

There are different kinds of card sorting: open and closed. An open card sort involves the users setting the categories themselves whereas a closed sort uses pre-determined categories with users placing items within the categories. There's also an option to run a "semi-closed" sort with users providing their own alternative names to categories they think are badly named.

I'm keen to use this on a current project, so more thoughts after I've tried this.

Posted via email from What’s this for?

Review of Designing Web Interfaces on DRB

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

My review of Designing Web Interfaces by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil (O’Reilly, 2009) is now up on the Designers’ Review of Books website.

Posted via email from What’s this for?

Secure? Of “course” …

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

I tried to enrol online for a course at City Lit a couple of days back. The registration procedure was a little clunky and involved a few inline frames but I managed to battle through it. I was using Firefox and some of the field names did not display in their entirety — so see all of the text you need to highlight them with the mouse and drag horizontally. If you failed to fill in a mandatory field you were dropped back in the middle of the page with no feedback as to what had just happened. Only scrolling to the top of the frame would tell you which fields you had failed to complete.

But, the worst part of the process for me was at the payments stage. When asked to submit my credit card details, I automatically hunt out the sure signs of a secure payment system — basic stuff such as a https in the URL bar and a padlock icon appearing. I saw neither in this case. Ok, it’s possible that the secure part of the site was buried in a frame, so I right-clicked to get a context-sensitive menu on the form hoping that this might reveal some information. It didn’t, so I quickly cancelled my sign-up.

I contacted the City Lit the next day and they assured me that the process is completely secure. This is what they had to say:

Thank you for your observation and be assured we take online card security very seriously. You will be comforted to know that Netbanx collects card payments on our behalf in a secure and PCI compliant environment. PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a world-wide benchmark mandated by the card schemes for the protection of cardholder identity and transaction information. Netbanx is a reputable company that was founded in 1996 and was the UK’s first payment service provider . We have been using their services since July 2006 without incident … Please be reassured that whilst the padlock does not appear, the payment window within the online enrolment window is secure with 128 bit encryption.

The first part of this sentence doesn’t mean much to me not being a security specialist. However, whilst I’m reassured that they do take security seriously, I’m concerned that the user receives no information or feedback as to the level of site security.

Now, I haven’t got any screen shots to back this up  – and can’t get any without going through the process again — so I’m prepared to admit I may have missed something, although I did examine the page in-depth. Some clear, explanatory text would have set my mind, and presumably others’, at rest — if you take pride in the level of security you offer, then let your users know (maybe skip the bit about PCI DSS though!).

Posted via email from What’s this for?