Adobe and Condé Nast (publisher of various magazines including Vogue, GQ and Wired) unveiled a new digital magazine experience based on WIRED magazine at the TED conference in Long Beach, California. Built on Adobe AIR and developed with Condé Nast, the tablet prototype illustrated the possibilities for magazine publishers to reach readers in new ways. The concept enables immersive content experience in digital form and allows new interactive features to stimulate reader engagement, including

• content designed specifically for the touch screen experience
• easy navigation methods, including an innovative zoomed-out ‘browse mode’
• the ability to browse image slideshows
• embedded 360 degree object viewers
• support for video and audio content
• the ability to rotate content using device accelerometer functionality

Related links

Adobe
Condé Nast
Wired magazine

Cone Trees is featured at Harry Brignull’s UXURLS along with other credible websites on user experience.

This is my definition for IA which is also my entry for the the Explain IA contest.

Update: I won a copy of Peter Morville’s new book Search Patterns at ExplainIA. I am looking forward to receiving it since the sample chapter I read was promising.

Top 3 Articles

Most popular

1. Tips for effective DIY Participant Recruitment for Usability Testing
2. Increase Conversions in Long Web Forms by Resolving the Accidental Back Button Activation Issue
3. Guidelines for conducting Effective and Efficient Meetings

Top 3 Blog Posts

Most popular

1. jQuery Masked Input Plugin- Increase usability, input masks for text fields
2. A Review of the Balsamiq Mockups wireframing application
3. Usability spotter #5- HP laptop touch pads with scroll zones- absence of tactile cue

Suggested reading

1. Usability Spotter #6- The Twitter login page password revelation issue
2. Web Accessibility- our responsibility as Web Industry Professionals
3. Usability Spotter #4: A Usability issue- Google Chrome Tab selection through the mouse

Top 3 Downloads

Most popular

1. Download Axure ‘Clear input field value on focus’ prototype/ widget library
2. Download Axure Touch Screen Hand Gestures Stencils
3. 15 Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India

Suggested Downloads

1. SEO through Accessibility- How designing accessible websites leads to automatic SEO
2. A free Minutes of Meeting (MOM) template
3. Cone Trees Wallpaper #2- Regenerate

Top 3 ‘News & Resources’

Most popular

1. Pranav Mistry’s “Sixth Sense”, game-changing wearable technology- a talk by Patties Maes
2. Web Accessibility- our responsibility as Web Industry Professionals
3. Dan Roam on “The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures”

Suggested Viewing

1. Don Norman on the three ways that good design makes you happy
2. Kim Goodwin on designing a Unified User Experience- integrating Interaction, Visual & Industrial design
3. Barry Schwartz talks about “The Paradox of Choice- Why Less is More”

Who should attend: Usability engineers and user experience practitioners who conduct usability testing of all experience levels, though this will be especially beneficial for those who work in a organization with an nascent usability engineering. or user research team or interested in creating one.

Registration: You can register for my tutorial using the online registration form (choose T 16).

Fees: Rs. 3000.

Here is a detailed description of the tutorial at the conference website. Details about the tutorial are also given below.

India HCI 2010- tutorial 16: Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India

Duration: Half day
Schedule: Sunday, 21st March 2010, Morning
Fee: Rs. 3,000
Participants: 10-25

Aim

‘Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India’ is based upon my experience working in an agile setting in an Indian organization that is set in stage 3 of Nielsen’s Corporate Usability Maturity description. The organization I work in creates Alexa Top 200 consumer websites where I conduct field and lab-based and summative and formative usability tests on both prototypes and the released product.

Cultural differences

1. India has a different cultural system as compared to the west. Its culture, values and language and ways of working and interfacing with people are different from those in the west. The difference is illustrated through Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions.
2. No book written on usability testing in India- All of the popular books on usability testing are written by western counterparts and understandably so, these are written in context of western users.

Organization differences

1. As an industry member, I would estimate that the vast majority of Indian organizations are between stages 1 to 4 of Nielsen’s Corporate Usability Maturity description.
2. At a stage where usability testing is not formally integrated into the product development lifecycle, technical capability is only half the contributing factor to successfully establishing the usability practice as an essential organ of the company. The ability to engage with stakeholders in a way that they continually offer support to the usability initiative is the other half contributing factor to maturing the usability practice within the organization. It is therefore necessary that technical knowledge has to be supplemented by the addressing of ‘soft’ issues that to tackle organization bottlenecks in order to successfully execute usability testing so that value may be derived from it that is recognizable by stakeholders.

Content

Specific to usability testing in India, the tutorial in particular talks about various practical tips dealing with usability test moderation to avoid introduction of bias that may occur because of the PDI dimension (moderator-participant) of Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions.

Usability testing can only take place if concerned stakeholders realize its value and see it as an integral part of the SDLC. They ultimately hold the key to deciding how much of a role will usability testing play in the SDLC. Since Indian organizations have a different way of working from MNC’s and foreign firms, the other half of the tutorial will talk about how to work towards successfully demonstrating the value of usability testing into Indian organizations (set in stages 2 to 4 or Nielsen’s Corporate Usability Maturity description). It will talk about what challenges may be faced, what mistakes should one avoid, about why business cases and generic deliverable templates don’t work, how to deal with time and budget constraints, and how to deal with attitudes and successfully connect with stakeholders.

Please go through my presentation: Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India (slide 13 onwards) to get a brief idea of what the presentation will contain which will not be limited to the content in this presentation.

Who should attend?

Usability engineers and any user experience practitioners who conduct usability testing of all experience levels.

A short biography of the tutor

Abhay Rautela works as Senior Human Factors Engineer at a leading internet services company in Noida and is responsible for planning, execution and oversight of user research and usability evaluation across projects that mostly include Alexa Top 200 websites. He has conducted formative and summative usability evaluations on low (paper) to high fidelity prototypes and the actual product in all phases of the SDLC. He has also authored usability testing deliverable templates and guidelines and has defined an optimized usability testing process to streamline the usability testing process in his current organization, in addition to authoring other user research deliverable templates.

Abhay has a BA (hons) Multimedia Arts degree with specialization in usability and accessibility from Middlesex University, UK in which he was batch topper. He has around 5 years of experience working in different areas of user experience, most of it being focused on interaction design and usability evaluations and user research. He has conducted trainings in the past on accessibility, streamlining the usability testing process and card sorting at Sapient (a leading international IT consultancy) and InfoEdge (a leading Indian internet services company) in addition to presenting at Bar Camp on usability testing in India.

Abhay has also recently been requested to contribute a chapter for a book on user experience which includes other known contributors who have authored and co-authored UX books. Abhay runs a website on usability engineering that is featured in AllTop along with other authoritative websites on user experience. His articles, posts, UI prototyping libraries and website visual design have been published, featured, included, pointed and showcased in Usability News (BCSCHI), Wireframes magazine, Evolt, Axure prototyping application website, SlideShare front page, Business Week’s Business Exchange and WaSP Interact among other places (links here).

He also runs two websites (that are slowly gaining popularity) for the User Experience community- The UX Bookmark and UX Quotes which he conceptualized, designed and now curates content on. In the past, he was manager of FlashMove, Singapore (world’s first Flash special user group) and presently heads The New Delhi UX Book Club and the SlideShare Web Accessibility group.

I made this wallpaper out of a snap I shot at the Sultanpur bird sanctuary, which is a fantastic place to visit over the weekend from Delhi.

Birds on Tree (brown)- 320x480 (downloaded 22 times)
Birds on Tree (brown)- 1024x768 (downloaded 11 times)
Birds on Tree (brown)- 1280x800 (downloaded 10 times)
Birds on Tree (brown)- 1280x1024 (downloaded 12 times)
Birds on Tree (brown)- 1440x900 (downloaded 10 times)
Birds on Tree (brown)- 1600x1024 (downloaded 11 times)
Birds on Tree (brown)- 1680x1050 (downloaded 10 times)
Birds on Tree (brown)- 1920x1200 (downloaded 11 times)

Birds on Tree (blue)- 320x480 (downloaded 12 times)
Birds on Tree (blue)- 1024x768 (downloaded 6 times)
Birds on Tree (blue)- 1280x800 (downloaded 7 times)
Birds on Tree (blue)- 1280x1024 (downloaded 7 times)
Birds on Tree (blue)- 1440x900 (downloaded 7 times)
Birds on Tree (blue)- 1600x1024 (downloaded 7 times)
Birds on Tree (blue)- 1680x1050 (downloaded 7 times)
Birds on Tree (blue)- 1920x1200 (downloaded 10 times)

Birds on Tree by Abhay Rautela is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

However, due to the incompleteness and the placement of the JavaScript, there is a possibility that the user’s password may get revealed (in the user name text field of the login form) if the user attempts to enter their account details before the login page completely loads. The description of the usability issue and solution are discussed ahead.

Update (Jan 20, 2010): I informed Twitter about it and Anamitra Banerji from Twitter product got back letting me know he has someone working on fixing it.

The Issue

Setting focus on text field to increase usability

In order to make the login form easy to use, the technical team at Twitter uses JavaScript to set focus on the user name text field upon loading of the login page. The user is saved time and effort of either:

1. Having to tab through elements on the page (using the keyboard) in order to set focus upon the ‘username’ input field.
2. Or moving the mouse to position it over the user name text field and clicking upon it in order to begin entering account details.

Placing JavaScript at the bottom to decrease page loading speed

The team also chose to place this ‘text field focus’ JavaScript at the bottom of the page code right before the closing tag. This makes sense since placing JavaScript at the bottom of the page helps decrease page loading time.

This is because when scripts download, nothing else can be downloaded along with it in parallel (in contrast, multiple images could have come through at the same time). So that is why moving them to the bottom gives a chance for the rest of the page to load up faster.

The above two combined form the issue

The ‘text field focus’ JavaScript, as discusses above, is a good idea, but would however only be effective if the JavaScript loads and sets focus upon the input field before the user manually does so.

And in the case of slower internet connections, since the JavaScript code is placed at the bottom of the page, there is a high possibility that the user may begin to enter their account details before the page fully loads and as a consequence, their password could gets partially or completely revealed.

So lets look at three cases- one where the JavaScript loads on time (before the user manually sets focus on the ‘username’ text field) and the other two, where the JavaScript does not load on time.

1. JavaScript loads before user manually sets focus on the ‘username’ text field and begins typing username

Everything is fine and as intended. Focus is set on ‘username’ text field. The user can proceed to typing in credentials.

2. JavaScript loads after user manually sets focus on the ‘username’ text field and user is about to begin typing or is already typing in the user name.

The script does not achieve its goal since it failed at setting focus on the ‘username’ text field for the user who had to do so manually. Before the user begins to type in the user name or during the process of doing so, the JavaScript sets focus on an already focused ‘username’ text field. This does not affect the user in any way who can type in the user name without any issues.

3. JavaScript loads after user sets focus manually on the ‘username’ text field, completes typing in username, and now sets focus on the ‘password’ text field, and is either:

1. Beginning to type in the password
   In the lesser probable case of the two, if the JavaScript loads just when the user is about to begin typing in the password, the JavaScript will shift focus to the ‘username’ field and the while the user begins entering the password, the password will get revealed in the ‘username’ text field since the focus has shifted to it.
   
   But won’t users notice their password appearing in the username text field? Most probably not until most of or the complete password has been revealed- novice to intermediate computer users will look at the keyboard while typing in the password. Expert users may not have to do so, but since there is also a possibility that expert users will choose complex passwords as compared to novice users, it is probable that they will look at the keyboard too while they type in the password too.
2. Already typing in password
   
   
   If the JavaScript loads while the user is already typing in the password in the ‘password’ field, then the focus will shift to the ‘username’ field in between and the password will partially be revealed in the ‘username’ text field as illustrated in the example below.

Severity of the issue

This could be labeled as a usability issue medium to high error severity since the issue translates to a security concern.

Having the password reveal itself without the wishes of the user is bad usability because the application is not behaving as the user expects it to. When a user enters data in a text box, the user expects the data being filled to appear in the text box- either masked or as is depending on whether it is a password text field or not. What the user does not expect is to see the focus of the text box change to another and their password get revealed.

Of equally serious concern is the consequence of the issue- the user’s password is partially or completely revealed, without their intentions of the user wanting to do so. This password may be observed by a passerby who the user does or does not notice, who may then go on to compromise the account.

The Solution

This issue is certainly something Twitter should fix immediately considering low level of effort (LOE) required to plug it up. There are two solutions to the issue, both very simple both with their pros and cons.

Solution 1

By shifting the code and placing it above the ‘username’ field of the login form, it is guaranteed that the script will load before the form loads. And thus, the focus will always be set on the ‘username’ text field.

Pro: Focus will always set on ‘username’ field before the user can attempt to do so
Con: Page loading speed may however be compromised.

Solution 2

This solution mitigates the issue in a different sense. It does not ensure that the goal of the text field focus’ JavaScript is met (which is to manage to always set focus upon the ‘username’ text field before the user can attempt to do so) but ensures that the unintended consequence of password revelation will never occur.

The solution is to modify the code logic and keep it at the position it is currently at- so page loading speed is uncompromised and the issue is not caused either.

Currently, the script simply sets focus on the username text field when the script loads. The script may be modified to set up a condition where the script first checks if the focus is already set on either the ‘username’ or ‘password’ text field of the login form. If so, we do nothing since we can assume that the user is busy entering account details. But if the focus is not set upon either of the fields, then we can, as the script, earlier did, set focus upon the ‘username’ text field.

The advantage here is that we do not compromise page loading speed. We also ensure that the user’s password does not accidentally get revealed. What we don’t ensure is the fact that the user may set focus manually upon the ‘username’ text field before the script does so.

Pro: Page loading speed remains uncompromised and the unintended consequence of password revelation can never occur.
Con: The goal of the ‘text field focus’ solution which was to always set focus on ‘username’ before user can attempt to do so is not met.

Your thoughts?

Here’s hoping to see Twitter patch this up as soon as possible. What are your thoughts?

In this video, Dave Gray provides an introduction with 5 basic principles for making better napkin sketches.

About Dave Gray

Dave Gray is the Founder and Chairman of XPLANE, a leading consulting and design firm focused on information-driven communications. Dave’s researches and writes on visual business and speaks and coaches educators, corporate clients and the public. He is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers.

He is author of the book (on consultative selling) called Selling to the VP and is currently working on a book for O’Reilly media Sunni Brown called The Visual Thinking Playbook, which is due out in January of 2010.

Related links

Xplane, VizThink
The book: Selling to the VP of NO
Dave Gray Info, Communication Nation, Visual Thinking School