Savvy Users have Changed Everything

Users are getting more and more used to how the web works and how to use their browser software. It’s true that if you ask the average person on the street what a browser is, they’re likely to say Google, but that doesn’t mean that when they open up “the internet” they don’t know what they’re doing. Using the web is part of the daily routine for millions of people, and those people are knowing more and more about how to use their browsers. People who know how their browser works know that they have the freedom to open links in another tab.

What About Old People?

Some people are not frequent users of the internet; they aren’t browser experts. The tabbed interface means nothing to them, and is only a confusion. They look at a browser, and when they click on something, they go somewhere. When they want to get back to where they have been, they use the Back Button. For this reason, opening a new window commits one of the cardinal sins of Usability: DON’T BREAK THE BACK BUTTON.
I've done UX testing on a good cross section of the population, but my favourite person to test on is my dad. He’s an "I am not good with computer" sort of person. When a site opens a new window, and he wants to get back to where he was, he cannot get back. He experiences extreme frustration, and stops web browsing. There have been several situations where he has been browsing to make a purchase, gotten frustrated, and left the computer to go to a store in person. That website lost a sale. This is a repeatable pattern; non-savvy person gets frustrated, closes entire window, does not finish call to action.

I’ve also done UX testing with people who have disabilities. The most frequently checked disability is sight loss; new tabs can present almost insurmountable problems to people who have poor sight. They cause confusion, frustration, and break the fundamental back button. The same is true for people who have cognition issues, or low sight, or manual dexterity issues.

Back Button Fatigue

This is not a real thing. People understand the back button, and are frustrated when it doesn't work. Savvy users can open in a new window, or use bookmarks for navigation; if they don’t want to use the back button to navigate, they don't.

Saving Website Resources

This is not an issue for a well crafted website. Your resources should be cached and have proper expires, and will load almost instantly and cost very little overhead after a back press.

Inaccurate Analytics

This is actually completely backwards. If a user is not reading your site, but has left it to read something else, your analytics should reflect this. They will then return to your site and finish reading. If you use external links, you end up with less useful information about how people are using your site; you over-report the time that people are spending on pages, and do not have an accurate representation of what is happening. Consider these user stories.

Overreporting your analytics is a bad idea. It give you false confidence and decisions based on bad data can give you bad results.

It's All About Freedom, Baby

The bottom line is this: as a UX designer and developer, you have to consider several different users, and how they can interact with your site. Going out and talking to people about how they interact with a site is very helpful, but it’s even more helpful to observe how people interact with a site, and what causes frustration and what does not. A User should be free to do whatever they want with a given link; open in a new tab, open in the same tab, whatever they want to do. The basic groups to consider here are:

Super Savvy users, Super Savvy users who are disabled: they’re already middle clicking on things they want to open later. I’m guessing that Anthony, the author, is in this group, because the flow described here is one for a quite savvy user. This group doesn’t care if you open new windows or not, unless you specify to open a new window *when they want to open the link in the same window*. Then they experience frustration.

Medium Savvy users: they don’t necessarily know to middle click, but they know how to navigate. When something opens in the same tab, they know to use the back button. If something opens in a new tab, they can switch tabs. They’ll take whatever you throw at them. They may experience frustration if they click on a link, and have to go back, or re-navigate to your site; this is typically a fairly mild, momentary frustration.

Medium-Savvy users who are disabled: New tabs and New windows are the single worst thing on the internet.

Non-Savvy users, Non-Savvy users who are disabled: new tabs are scary. The back button is broken. Nothing works the way I want it to work. I’m closing this whole internet and going to the store or watching TV. New tabs are causing extreme frustration.

In Conclusion

Making the web accessible should be one of your highest priorities as a UX designer. Everyone needs to be able to do everything on the internet. It’s not about being fair (though accessibility does aim to be fair); it’s about getting people to do what you want them to do on your website. The bottom line is that making an accessible website isn’t particularly difficult to do, and it will increase your bottom line, whether that is more traffic, more money, or more users.

All links should be left alone to be opened however users want to open them. If you are trying to control how your users experience the web, you’re doing a disservice to them and to your website. You’ll erroneously inflate some of your analytics, and you’ll frustrate a significant portion of your user base.

Other resources:

Nielsen: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html

Webcredible: http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-usability/new-browser-windows.shtml

Yes, Google Analytics can be fairly specific...

It's not a particularly difficult concept, and Imgur is doing the heavy lifting for us, but it was fun to work on. I mostly helped with planning (mostly over the phone) and also contributed the logo.

Social Networking. That's one of those buzzwords that I almost cringe when I hear.

There is a gap in Social Networking, and it's right in the middle. When you fall through it, you start to think of Facebook as an end point instead of a starting point. You think Twitter is actually a place to hang out with your friends. You think that Myspace... well, unless you think that Myspace is garbage, you're probably not thinking, and we'll leave that one alone.

The gap in Social Networking is where all the people who don't get it are hanging out. They're the people who keep sending you Farmville invitations and wonder why you're not jumping all over their need for irrigation. For them, the games are a way of hanging out with their friends online. A need to connect like this will prompt people to set their status to something like "nothing to report" which makes everyone else wonder why you'd actually make a status update like that. Why continue updating, when you've admitted that there's nothing left to say?

I'm not going to wax poetic on the transcendental need to shout out that we exist, or by the ennui of hanging out in a virtual world. But what is Social Networking actually for? It's actually pretty simple: Social Networking, in most cases, is just a synonym for Marketing. For most intents and purposes, Social Networking is just a tool to shout out I Exist! But it's no substitute for getting outside and actually talking to your friends (he says in his blog post).

I'm not saying that social sites are bad. I'll admit that I'm not a big fan of TheMyFace, but I use Twitter pretty extensively. So I'm a fan of social networking, but I also hate social networking.

And that's about when I lost steam with my rant on Social Networking. You can still find me on TheMyFace if you look hard, but it's better to find me on the TweetMaker: @andrewphoenix

Lenhard Euler: Mathematician

Euler (pronounced "Canada's Worst Hockey Team that's not The Senators") was a Mathematician in the 1700s. He was a genius, and he helped shape the world of mathematics that we know and love today. Check out Euler on Wikipedia for more in depth info about the fellow.

What's this all about?

Project Euler is gets you to combine mathematical insights with computer programming in an effort to find answers to a series of over 300 problems. It's not tied to a particular language, though there are some languages that will serve you better than others. It's all about finding the answer in an elegant fashion.

Why should I care?

Project Euler will help you to identify areas of interest for you, and to make you a better all around programmer (and mathematician). There's a ton of different subjects that are covered, and it's an opportunity to push your self in new directions.

Let's do an example!

Sure thing! Look at Question #1.

Add all the natural numbers below one thousand that are multiples of 3 or 5.

Not hard right? Make a loop that goes from 1 to 1000, and for each number check if it's divisible by 3 or divisible by 5. If it is, add it to a running sum. Pseudocode looks something like this:

x=1
sum=0
while x is under 1001
    if x is a multiple of 3 then sum = sum + x
    if x is a multiple of 5 then sum = sum + x

And at the end return sum. Does that give the right answer? Are we forgetting something?

Of course, if x is a multiple of both 3 and 5, then we've counted it twice. We can fix that in a few ways, like subtracting off x one time if it's a multiple of 3 and 5.

if x is a multiple of 3 and 5 then sum = sum - x

Or we could just solve it with an else

if x is a multiple of 3 then sum = sum + x
else if x is a multiple of 3 then sum = sum + x

Now a lot of people will understand that the "trick" is not really tricky in this case. Remember not to count multiples of 3 and 5 twice is pretty simple. But the curve is pretty steep - after 20 or 30 questions, it's much more hidden.

And that's the gist of what I'm saying tonight.

By the way, here's that pseudocode in python:

f=0
x=1
while x < 1000:
  if x%3==0:
    f=f+x
  elif x%5==0:
    f=f+x
  x=x+1
print f

This made deregistering widget areas pretty easy. In twentyten (something I child theme from a fair bit), the widgets are added on line 373 with code that looks like this:

function twentyten_widgets_init() {
  // Area 1, located at the top of the sidebar.
    register_sidebar( array(
    'name' => __( 'Primary Widget Area', 'twentyten' ),
    'id' => 'primary-widget-area',
   // and so on
 

So, you write an unregister function in your child theme's functions.php that looks something like this:

function my_unregister_sidebars() {
    unregister_sidebar('primary-widget-area');
    unregister_sidebar('secondary-widget-area');
    unregister_sidebar('first-footer-widget-area');
    unregister_sidebar('second-footer-widget-area');
    unregister_sidebar('third-footer-widget-area');
    unregister_sidebar('fourth-footer-widget-area');
}

Then you just call that in the widgets init hook, but give it a later priority:

  add_action( 'widgets_init', 'my_unregister_sidebars', 11);
  add_action( 'widgets_init', 'my_widgets_init',12);

Google wasn't super helpful for me until after I had figured out the solution to the problem. So, if you need to unregister widgets in a child theme, this is how to do it.

(Feel free to tell me if I have typoed anywhere.)

The phone is beautiful. The screen makes iPhone 3 screens look pretty bad and in my opinion, it beats the iPhone 4 in a side by side comparison. The Samsung is slick and gorgeous, responsive and vibrant; from a purely aesthetic standpoint, the phone is downright sexy. The call quality matches that of my previous phone (which was a real phone, not a handheld with a phone added on like many smart phones seem to be). I do not experience reception loss from holding the phone in a particular way. Using this device as a phone is easy and pleasurable.

The place where the device really starts to shine is when you start to dive into Android. There are a ton of apps and many of them are free, or under $1. Some of them suck; I have deleted 15 or 20 apps that I just didn't enjoy using, but there's no real downside to downloading paid apps because you can get a refund. Android market is pretty awesome. There are a ton of apps, some more useful than others; the barcode scanner is pretty cool and a Blizzard authenticator for WoW, I use just about every day. The google maps app works really well as a GPS which is beneficial since someone broke into my wife's car and style ours. There's a good selection of decent educational games for kids and, of course, a pretty decent app for wordpress which I am using right now.

I'm a big fan of how intuitive things are. The other day for example, my four year old daughter managed to record new ringtones and set them for events on the phone ("ooo your phones ringing. Blah blah" is now what I hear when someone calls me). The fact my kid can do that without any help from me is pretty impressive. It is true that she is a little geek in training, but it is still great to see how easy it is for her to manage fairly complex tasks.

Swype is impressive. This lets you glide your hand over the on screen keyboard and "draw" the words that you are writing. It does make for some interesting automatic corrections [Edit: Like version one of this article, for example], but significantly increases my (mostly) understandable wpm count. Look for a video of it on youtube and have a look, if you are unfamiliar with it; swype is certainly worth checking out.

Overall I would give this new phone high marks across the board. I have never seen a phone that I like as much. The iPhone 4 comes close, especially the overall aesthetic, but the responsiveness of this little machine and the slightly larger screen along with Android help it win out as far as I am concerned.

[Edit: I've got Hello World done in an Android App, and it took almost no time to do so. App Development is easy and fun.]

I've been trying to hone my Python skills, so I Dove Into Python with a vengeance. That didn't quite sate my desire for crazy coding fun, and my good buddy Sean suggested the Infamous FizzBuzz test.

Well, I loved it, and I searched for more similar problems, and I got to the first Project Euler question:

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.
Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

I was thrilled! A minor modification to my fizzbuzz program and I was off and running. I've currently completed somewhere around 20... but I'll admit that I've skipped to the end am trying my hand at Problem 282, the dreaded Ackermann Function.

So - if you're a coder, why don't you try it out?

The most cogent argument was from Doug, who had a vision. It's true - Apple won't be comparing themselves to the computers that you already have. They won't be comparing to your mobile devices. They're trying hard to carve themselves out a niche, which I understand and respect. I just think that they're doing a crappy job of it.

The first mistake is that they have failed spectacularly to live up to their hype, which, to be honest, isn't really their fault. It's hard to live up to the exquisite fanboyism and ludicrous expectations. Most people who have a Mac swear by them; I seem to be some sort of genetic aMac-freak, immune to the whiles of the computers that "just work". It's only natural that these people hole their beloved company to some intensely high standard to which Apple can not realistically meet. What they have before seems to be solid gold; they want solid gold in the future and, at best, the iPad seems to be bronze, cobalt or some other baser metal. People wanted a Tablet, capital T, Mac-style; instead they get an iPod. Er, sorry. And iPad. It's certainly not just an oversize iPod touch. There's the core of their second problem: this is being labelled as an actual Tablet. There are some problems with that, and most of them have to do with the fact that tablets already exist and every tablet you can buy right now does so much more than the iPad. In fact, the iPad can almost be defined more by what it's not and what it doesn't: No Flash, Doesn't Multitask, No GPS, No Webcam, No Widescreen, No Real Storage, No High Def, No USB, Doesn't Multitask.

What Apple's iPad isn't is a tablet; not how we currently understand tablets to work, anyways. When we say tablet, we basically just mean "laptop with touchscreen". That's a bit of an over-equivocation, but it's roughly true. When people say that they want a Mac Tablet, they want those Mac Tablets to have more in common with this Thinkpad X Series Tablet and less in common with this Telephone.

We all want our computers to be more powerful and less limited than our phones. Almost all of us frequent websites that use Flash. Almost all of us like to do more than one thing at a time on a computer. These things are an important part of the user experience especially in a pre-defined marketplace that already has dozens of different tablets to choose from. Most important, you need to distinguish your product enough from other products so that you don't come off as a huge corporation that's only trying to grasp money out of the hands of the clientele that you purportedly support and care for by reissuing a bulked up version of a product that you're already selling at 30% over fair market value.

The aforementioned Doug had a vision whereby people would use their iPads in the kitchen with no pesky wires, and it could be a hub, an easy access point, for lots of different things, all of which is true (except, arguably, as a place to have your music library - they have no current plans for an iPad that would hold even half of my personal music library, so it just won't work for me to store music on). But that already exists if you want it to. Point in fact: I've had this article open on 3 different computers in 6 different locations. One of them was the kitchen; I listened to a couple of youtube videos on my laptop, sans cord, while doing some dishes.

And that's the biggest problem with the iPad; everything it can do, something else does better.

Well, I'm still at the point where our graphic designer does much better work than me, but I'm improving, and most of it is due to brush sets. I think in the last 5 days I've downloaded almost 70 of them, and although I've since thrown out at least 40 of those sets, it's amazing what difference custom brushes make to designers. I never knew. I was a design brush virgin. But NO MORE!

Look for more in this space soon.