Jan 28, 2010: No use case necessary

Given that it's now the official national craze, I too will ruminate on the iPad...

I don't think that there's a clear use case for something that's small but not as small as a phone, and useful but not as useful as a laptop. (Best effort in a weak field to define the use case so far comes from Luke Wroblewski: "a digital version of your leisure time activities".)

But that doesn't matter.

It's relatively easy for Apple to create a new platform. There are already plenty of apps out there that will run on it, and the developer community will soon provide us with many, many more. It's what they do. And although only a small subset of those apps will provide any compelling value, only a small subset of those eventual thousands of apps needs to work. All Apple has to do is provide the platform, and make sure that it works well enough to support all those apps.

They're essentially leaving it to the developer community to figure out a mind-blowingly large number of micro use cases. There will be enough to make the iPad attractive to enough consumers for the venture to be profitable for Apple. Apple can ignore the traditional keystone requirement for product design—the need for a broad use case—and simply deliver a well-designed and sufficiently open platform.

PS As a publisher, I am very happy that Apple's ebooks will use EPUB, the open ebook format that we've invested ourselves in at Rosenfeld Media. I'm hopeful that those EPUBs will also be DRM-free, though considering Apple's past record here, I'm pessimistic. Does anyone know if they will be?

Jan 20, 2010: London, a word please

The early bird registration deadline is coming up (January 31) for the Etre workshops that Steve Krug and I will be teaching in London at the ICA (March 1 and 2).

If you don't mind, a word:

There are a lot of great opportunities to take good UX-related workshops in and around London. Why come to these?

Well, Steve Krug is simply fantastic. What can I say? We've been on the road for seven years, and every time I pop into his workshop, people are absolutely engaged: talking, interacting with each other and with Steve. (He's nice enough to say similar things about my workshop.)

Did you think I was going to say rapt? Worshipful? Well, they are, which is what you'd expect with one of the Three Gods of Usability. And they're entertained as well: Steve is even funnier in person. (Added bonus: Steve's new workshop matches his new book.)

What you might not realize is that Steve and I both teach our workshops to small groups (usually a couple dozen) and over the course of the day we work with you very closely. We often learn everyone's name. Steve may critique your site, and I'll likely sit down with you and we'll look at the query data together. Honestly, Steve and I are usually a bit surprised when attendees' evaluations emphasize the intimacy of our workshops; why would we (or you) want it any other way?

I'll never be as entertaining as Steve, but my attendees seem to enjoy themselves. I'm certainly very earnest (just check this photo and you'll see). I'll not just help you through the analytics (see my workshop slides): I'll also make a strong case for why UXers need to learn analytics in general, and suggest a framework for doing so (see this presentation for some of my ideas along these lines).

If you were wavering on attending, I hope this helps. So take advantage of the early registration deadline (again, it's January 31) and I hope we'll see you in March!

PS I'm hoping to take along my six-year old, Iris, who's fallen in love with geography and is absolutely desperate to cross an international border (any will do). Will be trolling for to-dos at some point here on Bloug; I don't think that the London Eye will keep her occupied for three days...

Jan 19, 2010: Site search best practices

A client recently asked me to help come up with a list of "world-class" implementations of site search. "World-class" is always a red flag term for me, because it's a crutch term that suggests that there isn't a clear idea of what constitutes actual quality. (Ergo, it should be banned, like "redesign" and "building community".)

So, being the annoying consultant that I am, I gently scolded them, saying that there wasn't one ideal or even optimal local search implementation. But there were some principles worth considering. Here's my first stab; given that these took only a few minutes, I'll likely add more:

1. Keep the initial query entry UI simple
2. Make sure it's persistent in location on pages, and that it's on all pages
3. Support query refinement (and avoid "advanced search" UIs)
4. Repeat a query back in the refinement UI and display # of search results
5. Provide refinement options that fit the need (e.g., don't provide options that narrow result sets when 0 results have been retrieved)
6. Show just enough information—and the right information—per search result to enable users to get the information they need (either on the results page or by clicking through to a result page)
7. If you're searching multiple content areas, see if it pays to expose these differentiations; if so, what order should results be presented in? (federated search)
8. Support result sorting (e.g., chronological)—if it helps
9. Teach your search engine to recognize regularly occurring queries for specific types of information (e.g., names of people, products, unique IDs) and configure search results accordingly
10. Ask for feedback on search results pages—both quantitative and qualitative (e.g., "rate you satisfaction with what you found; if not satisfied, what would you have liked to find?")
11. Learn what your most frequent queries are; then test their performance regularly
12. Learn what queries fail most frequently, and fix them
13. Manually create recommended search results for the most common queries

Does this list stick against your wall? Anything obvious that I'm missing? If I can, I'll assemble good examples of each (and feel free to suggest some yourself).

Dec 07, 2009: A Union Index?

I've been kicking around an odd idea ever since starting Rosenfeld Media—the idea of a union index, a compilation of all of our books' indices. Now that we've actually got a few books out (#6 is due in about six weeks), it's time to revisit the idea and consider the indices' collective potential.

Want to help me figure it out?

First, imagine a single, combined index—possibly a single page—that'd reference whichever books where an index entry occurred. Then picture the ability to filter that index by individual title. Now we're ready for some questions:

Does it make sense to put an individual book index on the web? Each Rosenfeld Media book has its own web site, and we already make each book's tables of contents, FAQs, and other materials available. Would there be additional utility in viewing a book's index? Coming from a background in librarianship, I know that there are a few index fetishists among us who might judge a book by its index (a character in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle goes further, judging the indexer's personality). I imagine one might indeed get a sense of a book's scope, but unless there is a link to a webified (and, likely, free) version of the book, there'd be no navigational value. (Given that we're a for-profit, we'd likely link to a way to quickly purchase the relevant title.)

Does it make sense to put a collective index of many books on the web? If the term "remote testing" or "Axure" occurred in multiple books, that might be an interesting factoid. Even more interesting—a report of the most frequently-occurring terms (hmmm, this is starting to sound suspiciously like site search analytics). Of course, a union index would say something about the collective scope of Rosenfeld Media books, but I'm not sure who—aside from me—would find that useful. So the jury's still out.

Does it make sense to create individual pages for each index term? On the surface, this may seem like the least useful idea yet. But what if each page could provide these things for an index term:

• Link to a glossary definition (if available).
• Retrieve the term's results from Google (duh).
• Retrieve the term's results from UX Zeitgeist (yes, we're still working on it, and it's going to improve radically).

That's still likely not much value to users. But to Rosenfeld Media? Could be quite promising:

• If we SEO these pages reasonably well, the more specific terms might bring in a decent amount of essentially free traffic. (After all, who else is going to do this?)
• We can promote our own books on those pages.
• We can insert some Google advertisements on those pages, which, while not bringing in retirement money, might fund some future Rosenfeld Media holiday party.

This is my first pass at fleshing the idea out, and frankly, my own reaction is lukewarm. Then again, these pages wouldn't be hard to create, nor would they get in the way of other, more critical aspects of the rosenfeldmedia.com user experience. So I'm tempted to go for it.

Still, it seems like I'm missing something. Any suggestions? Good ideas are always worth a free book, according to this publisher.