Manaswi

Monday, November 27, 2006

What do you do?

The current era of specializations requires people with different specializations working together, to make things happen. This requires lot of mutual respect and understanding of each other’s work (discipline, responsibilities, roles), which might lack in reality. IT industry is also facing this challenge or at least I see it that way.

With Managers, Technical Leads, BAs (Business Analysts), Testers, developers with different specializations, all working together, it takes effort from all to understand what the other person’s work is. You keep hearing… “Managers don’t have work” or “BAs job is so easy… s/he just has to write some documents” on the other hand, the managers would be crying… “These developers are taking so much time… it’s a small work…” or “just do it na… 5 min ka kaam hai” (taken from one of ex-manager). I guess people seldom find out time from their own troubles to be able to appreciate what someone else is doing.

UI Designers
With office chemistry already having a complex composition, comes in one more element, called UI Designer (aka HCI specialist, Usability Engineer, Information Architect, Human Factor Specialist, User Experience Designer). Their main job is to simplify the use of the software/applications. I am not expanding on their roles and responsibilities of a designer. You can find a lot on web about them… please help yourself in case you need more information.

This is one species which is more alien than most of the disciplines. Many Employees wouldn’t even know if their company has such expertise. I being a designer know the pain when people don’t have a clue as to what advantage I am bringing on to the plate. In spite of actively trying to explain or sell Design, it remains a mystery for most of IT Industry. This reminds me of one of our professor, Kirti Trivedi’s, first lecture where he asked why do you want to join design when this is one of the fields where others don’t understand your work. I didn’t realize that time as to how it would feel like in such a situation. I do sometimes now. It doesn’t make designers that innocent, I feel even designers fail to understand other’s work. I have seen many designers commenting on developers coding without seeing the bigger picture…blah blah…failing completely to understand a developer’s mindset and responsibilities.

Coming back to people’s perception on design and designers, it sometimes looks like a sad state. Especially when one of the Top Management guys of a company quotes that “I don’t know whether you are artists or engineers”. On the other hand, now I am more adept to handle such comments or people’s understanding of design. I take these more lightly and try to enjoy it. I used to discuss it with one of my colleague and laugh it out. Thought that’s the way to get over it. Soon we had a lot of one-liners, which we used to hear quite often and showed people’s perception on design.

One-Liners: Here are some of them which designers face in the industry

Typical mails: A manager mails you to help her/him with making a banner. S/he writes… ”Please do the UEL (User Experience Lead) of the banner”. How on earth can one do UEL of a banner?

It’s a new project; you are excited to work on it. You are in call with your client trying to explain what we do and what process we follow. You tell him we do user research to find out what are the user kinds for the system. Client: “You can ask me those questions, I know the user” (as if user is one guy who is great friend of the client!). You gather courage and ask him “ Ok. Do you know different users of the system?”… A common reply… “ You don’t have to do study on this. The user is a general user… like you and me…” (Oh… such an easy answer… why didn’t I think of this? And how can you compare you and me? You are 60 while I am 24. You are sitting in US while I am in India…)

Other common scenario, a manager while reviewing your work, will mail you… “ The mockups have come out really well. Every thing is fine. But can you change the color to pink? We are good to go then…” (Mera waala cream… from the asian paint advertisement.) Every Manager has a different color choice.

Manager/Developer tries to convince you for her/his solution saying, “As a user, I want it to happen this way” (Wah… Kabhi User kabhi Developer?)

Just an hour before a release… you get call from a manager whom you wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t know the project/software or anything but the manager will ask, “Hey… do a usability review of the application please”. (Usability review??? Abhi??? What can the developers possibly change 1 hour before. When the structure is not there… why do you want to change the skin?”

These are some of the situations and statements, which I found funny. I assume different disciplines will have their own one-liners, which will amuse and amaze them. Though these are good to joke around, I would still suggest people to understand each other’s work.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Registration Forms

Almost everything on net needs registration. So it becomes very important to design them as easy to use as possible. As a designer, even I tend design other pages of a site more carefully than the registration page (Ahh!! User is going to use just once). But I realize that badly designed Registration pages could mean less users getting registered to your website.

Lately, in my quest to be more aware of the web, I explored many websites. Some of which required registration. My spirit was let down looking at the lengthy registration form and sometimes didn’t have the courage to fill them. I have half registered many a sites and left because it was not easy to use.

I am listing down some of the common mistakes I see in the registration forms

Long Registration Forms: There are lot of fields to be entered some of which may not be required. Logical grouping of fields is not done.
Only the necessary fields should be present. Other fields, which are not so important can be presented after one is registered. The Fields should be grouped into smaller chunks.
Producing all the fields at once: This discourages the user to go through the heavy looking pages.
Try to divide the whole process into smaller chunks. Starting from most important first.
If the Form is divided over few pages, there is no indication of how many pages in total the form has and where among those are you currently.
The UI should inform the user about how long the whole process is.
Mandatory Fields are not marked
Should mark them
Inappropriate error messages: Error messages are either too technical to be understood by a layman or they are too short to make any sense.
Error messages should be appropriate. A good practice is to mark the fields, which need to be re-entered with a summary at the top of the page. Thumb rule for error messages which I follow at least: Punch Line( error statement in 4-5 words), Details of error (In small text), Next Steps (what should the user do).
No option to check availability of a username.
This features avoids lot of irritation later if you don’t find the username existing

One other issue which bugs me every time is the jumping through fields everytime. Over usage of forms make me feel lazy and I seldom use mouse for a form. Its easier using tab through the keyboard. Please dont ask me to use mouse again in between a form! The combination of mouse and keyboard to fill a form becomes a heavy task. The co-ordination between mouse and keyboard is often required while you enter your birth date in a form using the dropdowns. I find it not very accessible. Especially when you are entering the year. In most of the cases you have to use the arrow key a lot, if you are not using a mouse. Say if your birth year is 1981, you will press key "1", which will take you to 1999 in most cases. Now you need to go back to 1981 by pressing up arrow. If you are using mouse, it opens a long list of years and choosing your birth year becomes a bit of a task. Same for date and month. In most cases you need to press lot of keys, a lot of times.

The answer is with Mozilla firefox. If you use Mozilla to enter a form, you can just type your DOB over the dropdowns. That is to say if you type 28 and the dropdown will jump to 28 and if you type 1981 and the dropdown will jump to that. This makes the dropdowns really accessible. I hope IE also helps its user by this feature.