searching

I must comment on how to find a car. Last weekend we needed to drive different cars and SUVs so we could feel how they drove and to see how much room each had. Looking at a photo on a web site just is not good enough for us. We have to physically touch it and hit the accelerator to feel the power. Having said all that, the two best web site designs for searching for vehicles are Ebay Motors and Carmax. A more traditional approach can be found at Auction Direct.

Looking at the later one, you see many dropdown menus populated with tons of choices. This is nice to see all of the choices but the dropdowns are totally disconnected. The result is information overload, but since we are all well trained internet monkeys, we do not seem to notice. Until we see a usable interface that actually helps us find our way through the huge forest of unlimited choices of vehicles. This is not a new revelation, just tried and true usability design principles applied to real life situations. Of course if we only had a couple of choices then we wouldn't need this creative thinking. A couple of choices, a couple of dropdowns and we are done.

I must say that I really enjoy using the Carmax site. It always tells me how many cars in each category even before I filter down my choices. As I refine what I am looking for, I can easy remove the filters to increase the choices. Very nice and worth seeing and using even if not in the hunt for a used car. I am so happy when I find usable software!

email subscriptions

I am currently subscribed to 2 different email groups.

One is discuss@ixda.org, where I am currently receiving around 50 emails per day on the new Apple iPhone. Normally I receive around 10-20 a day on some hot topic as it seems like someone always has something to say. This group is for Interaction Designers.

The other is agile-usability@yahoogroups.com, where people talk about trying to integrate traditional up-front design into agile development methods. I like the term Just-In-Time-Design as it describes what takes place. I have experienced this first hand on a project I worked on for 6 months last year. It was definitely hard to get used to as I wanted to observe users and run usability tests, but instead I had to give in to the fact that the design was getting better every week and sometimes daily instead of trying to create the perfect app up front from user observations and tests. I really like the quick iterations and putting something in front of users as soon as possible. I don't like the lack of time thinking about design as it always seems like I am rushing into a decision. But the app does get better over time...