Times have just got to change. I’m a little sick of living in a world that is regionalise into sales and licencing zones for no real reason besides to restrict sales due to some arcane money grubbing corporate policy.

What makes matters worse is people building experiences that highlight this and rub our face in it time and time again!

I regularly buy music online from various places, I tend to favour non DRM music, or if I can buy directly from the artist which is even better – I don’t like iTunes much at all.

Now eMusic, which I use, have recently redesigned and tweaked their user interface  towards a very strongly  recommendation engine based sales model.  Now I have no issue with this at all, in fact I applaud it as a welcome change, as it’s always good to discover new music.

It’s Very Simple

After you have signed in, eMusic knows your country of residency as it’s in your billing profile, they also know your likes, dislikes and  previous purchases.  Which is good as all this leads to a better browsing and recommendation experience.

Or so you would think.

Below is the home page of the eMusic site after I signed in.   It shows you a selection of “New and Noteworthy” albums.

Now seeing as eMusic knows so much about me, I would expect the selection to be tailored towards my tastes; and yes it is, at least a few of the albums on the home page are of interest.

However despite knowing so much about me, eMusic goes and destroys the entire experience by not allowing me to purchase ANY of the albums recommended.   Due to licensing restrictions in Australia.

Here I am, wanting to purchase an album, but I can’t.   To make matters worse eMusic decides to wave a large flag in my face, screaming, “HA HA you can’t buy this”…

Changing the Approach

Now what would it have taken to exclude the albums from being recommended.  Emusic you already know they are “Not Available” due to my being in Australia, as we can clearly see this on the screen (above).

So just exclude the items “Not Available” from the query, really it’s not that hard.  Just show me the “Available” high rated or new albums.

A recommendation is a waste of time if I can’t purchase it.

Maybe eMusic just wants me to move a few clicks away and download the music for free.

You know I try and support and do the right thing by the musicians, but sometimes the paper pushers just get in the way and destroy the experience.

The model and experience is broken, they need to change.

I have been interested in agile process for a while, especial it’s use with UX techniques.

The other day I ran into a myth that there aren’t many User Experience Design people with skills that can work on agile teams.

It seems UX people aren’t very flexible.

This I find almost laughable, in fact most UX professionals I have found are extremely flexible, often changing tack or techniques as required, at a moments notice.  Maybe we are too flexible.

The core of any agile process really is to have a role less team that can specialists with generalised skills.

Having the traditional defined roles of a Architect, Business Analysis, Project Manager and Developer is really against the principles of working as a collaborative team to achieve days tasks.

In fact what you want to have is the entire team being “T” shaped in a way.    With just deep specialisation in key areas, but still able to operate on other duties as required to get the team over the line.  Hence like the rise of the UX Developer.

Looking at this mix, maybe a User Experience Design “T” shaped person is also required.

Well it seems that “user experience” or even “design” is still a dirty word in the agile sphere.

Sadly I see this time and time again.  The UX specialist is brought in on a agile project at the end or just to correct some issues.   The consistency of maintaining the user experience is often lost as they leave.

The reason given is often that they can’t find UX people to met the team requirements when they are building the team.  Or that the user experience or requirements aren’t on the clients mind.

There is also a false belief that there aren’t any designers that can code (at least on the front end) and understand User Experience and maybe get Usability too.

Looking in the Wrong Place.

I’m calling people out on this one!  I know a lot of my freelance contacts (including me) who are UX or design based could fill any of these “missing skills” for an agile team.

The people exist, we the “T” shaped UX people are sitting around waiting.

It’s just your recruiters or  team builders that aren’t looking in the right places or asking the right questions.

Mainly this comes from the way people are recruited – along old school waterfall process – go get a BA, a Project Manager, a few Developers and maybe a tester or two.   Unless the BA and Testers are closet UX people, and it does happen, the project is going to face issues.

Which is a pity as these project could escape the usual last few sprints with the UX polishing consultant, and do it all properly from the start and save resources.

I guess that solution is for all UX people to just say they are a BA instead.

Will be very interesting to see the audience attending the upcoming Agile UX  Conference in Sydney.

As with any young industry we tend to endlessly debate the labels we should be placing on the User Experience based roles that we are conducting.

Along with this debate on the labels, we seem to be now in a blame game on who really is responsible as an industry (which I had no idea we where) for the on going career development of  junior,  mid level and senior UX people. Maybe better to just fix it folks.

As these elements of navel gazing have been going on quietly in the background the game has been changing.   Maybe For the better.

With any new discipline, well new to the main stream, it will influence other roles as elements of its workflow and techniques become widely known.

Over the last three or so years I have been noticing that there has been a  dramatic tendency to move away from the UX professional to favouring o role more like that of a senior developer or sometimes a BA with UX skills. Not that BA′s doing UX is that new, we all moonlight as BA′s when we can’t find UX work.

Let′s call them a UX developer.

It is not all that bad.

Now I know a lot of you will be a gast at this.  But just think for a moment.

To often as UX professionals we are asked to do the impossible, to be the super UX hero and save the day.

You know the scenario well.  You get a phone call asking for help with a project that is in its final stages.  All they need is a little UX magic to make the project shine.  Familiar?

Now you know it’s way to late in the project for you to have any major influence on any of the underlying flaws in the UX. But you take the gig anyway.

You do it in the  vain hope that you can at least make a little difference and hopefully the project management will learn that the time to get the UX professional involved is at day one, not before launch.

You do the best you can, but you know it’s not going to be good enough.

The watching, learning, mentoring.

Now the senior developer or BA watches and learns from you, maybe you inspire them to go and do a little professional development on UX.  Overall they pick up a few core UX skills.   Which is good.

On the next project these forward thinking devs or BA start to apply these learnt skills early in the process, so at least in part there is some element of UCD with a UX component considered.  Which again is good.

After all they are already a part of team framework – project manager, BA, dev. With someone in this team championing the UX component there is no need to inject a UX consultant into the mix, who is just going to disrupt things anyway.

Now from a project management view the injection of the UX professional just didn’t work out that well anyway. At least now the team internally now has the UX skills to move forward.

Developers control the game anyway.

Yes the UX developer does have at Cooper puts it “skin in the game”.  Yes they are concerned with optionisation of the system, to focus on the best business outcome.

However the UX consultant isn’t the only one that can deliver a non biased view that supports the user cases.   A good BA or UX developer can wear this hat as well. They can be objective they can change hats mid stream.

I have seen this more and more with recent projects.

Afterall we as UX professionals don’t control the projects, the devs do.   Now maybe we should be training and mentoring developers in the UX cause not designers. Which is opposed somewhat to what Nat Boehm has to say.

So overtime maybe the UX consultant will be as dead as the webmaster, a thing of the past.

In the future maybe consideration of the UX will be just a mainstream inclusive activity of the development team.

I don’t mind completing surveys, I even do those phone surveys.  Having working with several different marketing teams and conducted countless UX information gathering surveys over the years.  I can understand the difficulties of getting a good response from people. So I don’t mind taking the time to complete the odd survey.

Still I have to wonder sometimes if the teams behind the surveys are really understanding their audience that is completing the survey in the first place.

A few weeks back our fence was blown over in a storm.   We put in an insurance claim, it was processed, and we got the fence repaired.  No issue, good service all round.

Then I get an email request to complete a customer satisfaction survey from my insurance company.

What is Dissatisfied

The survey seems very standard. Besides being inaccessible in parts if you only use a keyboard.

All was good until we (partner and I) complete a question that asked us to rate the service from 1-10 (10 being outstanding).  We gave them a 7.   The survey responds asking why we were dissatisfied.  We weren’t.  We just rated 7/10.   Not perfect, but not dissatisfied by our ranking.   But the survey consider the rating of 7/10 as dissatisfied as it changed the questioning to suit.

This assumption, that if it’s not a 9 or 10 then the customer must be displeased, doesn’t in anyway take into account the personalised rating scale of the customer.   We may never give a score of 10 or 1.  We could be very happy with a score of 7/10, as we were.

Lesson to be learnt here is that you can’t assume that a 7/10 or even 6/1o indicates a negative emotion or dissatisfaction from the customer.   This type of survey  gleans towards a negative bias or an over inflated towards the extreme positive.

Now that was a minor issue compared to the next one.

Doing the Likert Scale

The presentation of a Likert scale question is never easy.  A UX professionals we are always looking for a new way to present a question or interface without promoting any bias.

However when we were presented with the following question.  We both starred at the screen for a good minute before we could jointly work out what was required.

What you are meant to do, and it took us a few goes to work this out, is drag the card (on the left) to the response boxes (on the right) and drop them there.  They then appear as a box with text in within the response area.

There are a number of issue with this interaction:

• It’s very different to the traditional layout, it was completely outside what we were expecting.
• Initially you can read the page question as “How would you rate your experience in terms of:” Answer – “Extremely, Very, Reasonably…”
• You may ignore the small help text “Please drag each item to a category”
• You may ignore that card completely
• There is no indication as to what an “item is” or what a  ”category is”, they mean the card or questions and the possible answers (on the right).
• The process of reviewing or moving categories isn’t as smooth as it could be.
• There is bias to dragging the cards (items) to the responses (categories) at the top of the page.
• It’s only usable with a pointing device.
• I just don’t even want to think about the accessibility of this.
• I still don’t know what the “+” buttons on the responses do.

Yes it’s fine when you workout what to do. But most people aren’t they concerned about the survey and are likely to leave if the question layout breaks a mental model.

Overall it just seems to be a fancy “cool” javascript insert, that frankly should have been killed off or tweaked to make it usable.

This is a classic example of a new interaction technique not being the best delivery method.  Sometimes the cool tech is just not the best way.

Now the concept is still valid, but it just needs a little more refinement, and maybe a little proper user testing and it would be an innovative interface.

Still sometimes I do wonder if these insurance firms employ anyone to consider the user experience of their customers.

I get asked this a lot. “What are the best UX books to read?”

In true UX tradition my answer is depends.

It depends on your experience as a UX practitioner, your experience with scientific research methods, psychology, interaction design, user interface design, product or visual design and your level of communication skills.

Still having a list of starter books would be handy.

Yeah sure others have their lists from the likes of Will Evans, Paul Seys and Nick Finck however some of the books on these are either too complex (for someone new to UX) or take way to long to get to the point. Bit like this post.

So here is a list of books I would pick as the must read UX books.

The UX Book List

• The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett
• A Project Guide to UX: For user experience designers in the field or in the making by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler
• Undercover User Experience Design by Cennydd Bowle, James Box
• Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko
• Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design by Robert Hoekman Jr.
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper
• A Practical Guide to Information Architecture by Donna Spencer
• 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People: What Makes Them Tick?  by Susan Weinschenk
• Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design by Giles Colborne
• Measuring User Experience by Thomas Tullis, William Albert
• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art  by Scott McCloud
• Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder

More Specific Methods and Techniques Tuning

• Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests by Jeffrey Rubin, Dana Chisnell
• Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules by Jeff Johnson
• Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski
• Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indy Young
• Card Sorting: Design Usable Categories by Donna Spencer
• Prototyping: A Practitioners Guide to Prototyping by Todd Zaki Warfel
• Search Patterns: Design for Discovery by Peter Morville, Jeffery Callender
• Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan Brown
• The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas  by John Pruitt , Tamara Adlin
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web  by Louis Rosenfel, Peter Morville
• Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish
• Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography by John Van Maanen
• Remote Research by Nate Bolt,  Tony Tulathimutte
• Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson
• Storytelling for User Experience by Whitney Quesenbery, Kevin Brooks

Let’s Get a Lot Deeper and Serious

• The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun
• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
• Heuristics and Biases by Thomas Gilovich
• Design Meets Disability by Graham Pullin
• The Accidental Taxonomist by Heather Hedden
• Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research by Patricia L. Sunderland, Rita M. Denny
• How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
• Living with Complexity by Don Norman

So what are your killer must have UX books, I’m sure they are few that are different to the list above.

I was killing time, waiting, doing the Dad’s Taxi thing. While I waited, I was catching up on Twitter, on my phone, plus reading the various articles from my stream.

You know what is becoming a real pain point.

Non responsive designed web sites. The ones that don’t scale well on mobile devices, sadly they are still the norm.

Especially news and information sites.

Why is it the information on these sites being the major selling point and yet it seems to be very hard to access on a mobile device. it’s not like mobile is new.

It’s got to the point when I follow a link to one of these sites and it becomes to hard to read I just abandon the article.

Change is Required

Now in the early days of the mobile web, a few years back, I would put up with this.

Sure I could get reasonable rendering of a page. But you know its just too small to read effectively.

So you zoom in and play the silly game of rescale the page just right so you can see the content area filling the screen. Being careful not to touch those damn banner ads.

Well I’m sick of this!

I just want to get on the site read the information and go. Not spend half my time realigning the page so I can start reading the site. How hard can it be, we have the technology.

After all I’m the one in control here. If your site is just making to too hard to read on a mobile then why should I bothered staying.

Interconnectivity is the Key, not the app

The key here is being able to interconnect and link information sources in a way than I can browse a stream of information, conversation and the like that I am interested in and can read with ease.

Not articles that has been selected by some marketing focused editor on some mobile app.

Just like the social network is about me. So the information sources on the web need to be about me.

Yet people are in love with apps. They are the savior of the universe, or so we are being told. This has refocused media outlets to the mobile app space, instead of first looking at their web sites.

Present the only way to truly interconnect information is via the humble hyper link, the backbone of the web, with a little RSS thrown in for good measure. Not a handful of mobile apps.

Mobile Apps just fail in this area as you can’t really, at present, link information sources between them. Unless they act as an aggregator like FlipBoard.

Given this wouldn’t the web be a better delivery medium for information sites than the silo of an app.

I Want My Web, My Way, Now.

There you go media, news and information sites you are on notice.

Your apps are a waste of time, they are just dead silos of information. They are not an excuse to not format your web sites for the mobile web.

You need to go back and stop playing in the app sandbox and get into the wilds and fix your web sites, make them usable, readable on my mobile device.

Or I’m just going to look elsewhere.

I do wonder how the mainstream deals with this issue.

There seems to be a trend of late to take the minimialisation of interactive design to the extreme. Now I’m all or minimialisation and making user interfaces simipler.

You know making an interface streamlined to just the solid functionality of the interaction and no more.

I have been noticing a very frightening tread. In an effort to make things more usable, we are designing interfaces without the very functions used to support usability in the first place.

It’s a bit like stripping back a breakfast of toast and coffee to just a single shot, in a paper cup and plain crustless white bread. Yes it’s eatible, but where are little extras which make it a plesant experience.

Sadly with the removal of usability functionality the component of the accessibility quotient of a design also takes a very large if not fatal hit.

Streamlining an interface isn’t a simple task of just removing a few things, it’s a pain staking process of failure after failure as we tweak the interface, slowly taking it back to its core functionality without removing usability.

Even the best interface and interaction designs had a hard time doing this.   So why are just removing things with out any thorough.

Some examples of critically removed elements would be:

• Any helper prompts from a form.
• Any indicators for which feids are required, especailly on complex forms.
• Field lables (names) themselves, especially on the username password pairs for login feilds.
• Keyboard highlighting on form fields when navigating with a keyboard.
• Grouping of fields on complex forms into like chunks, even if progressive disclosure is used.
• Completely removing all word based labeling from buttons, leaving only confusing iconography.

Why is this happening. Well I can’t say first hand why, but I can damn well draw some conclusions.

1. Deleting Usability

   The visual design is compromising the usability. You know all those extra elements (as mentioned above) well they can often look ugly and clutter a page, so from a design view they just need to go, or be hidden. Afterall we want to make things simple and neat.

2. Following the Leaders

   There is a misguided following of the interactive design and usability principles. Too often younger or inexperienced designers will follow the trends that they see on mass, without real regard or thinking of the implications of what they are doing. They just see some wanky “big name” designer doing it, so it must be right. Often the truth is it isn’t at all.

3. Misunderstanding

   Yes they may have read a few blog posts on minimialisation or discussed it second hand with a few other misguided designers. But overall what they should be doing is spending a little time on some professional development, read some of the authorittive some books on the subject, attend a few UX conferences. Get to understand the topic in full.  Practice it, test the outcome, fail, fail, fail and learn from the failure.

4. Testing

   Test with real people. Yes I know it’s obvious. however testing with the auidence of the interaction you have designed for will reveal very quickly the issues. Of course the testing has to be conducted correctly without any bias.  Script testing will not cut it at all.

5. Only Good Reviews

   To offen they will look towards “their peers” on some designy forum, which will just back slap them and tell them they are awesome. Being told something is great, is well nice. But frankly in order to become a better designer you need to know what is wrong as well as what is right. You need to get a fair review of your work. This is the fault of the communtiy and a core of various backslapping designers.

In a way these designs aren’t bad. Just lacking in understanding of what those small details are they have stripped away.

They have their heart in the right place, but in reality it’s as if they where desiging sites with CSS with an old school table layout. They are just lacking the bigger picture.

So if you are in this school or think you might be.  I’m not having a personal go at you.   As a designer you need to leave your ego at the door and think only for the betterment of the design.

All I want you to do is stop and think.

When was the last time you read about how to apply a certain UX technique in detail. Or read about the failure of a method in particular situation, and the subsequent analysis as to why.

Yes within the web industry we have the zealots, true believers or the like. These are the people who back and promote causes towards best practice, inclusive design, standards adoption to responsive design.

Sure they will talk about their successes and sometimes document them .

Still it’s rare they talk about their failures.

Now in the UX segment things are no different, if the success is documented, it’s presented to us as an high level details. Failure, so don’t talk about.

So, we sit back and just plod on with just an idea of the right direction that worked for the experts, but still no real details.

You may think there isn’t a lot that we can really share.   Not so –  there are lots of things we can all share starting with our  wins and finally our failures.

Sharing the Wins

Yes sure we all go out and promote our wins, celebrating what we did right, hinting at our winning formulas.  Publishing all these details, or lack of, on our business web sites.

Great, this is stella for your marketing, hats off to you if you are doing this.

Seeing other succeed and sharing their  secrets of success, can make you feel like good things are possible and wash away the negativity we see from day to day.  As long as it’s presented with out rubbing peoples noses in it.

The important thing is the level of detail, are you telling us all not just about the win, but the how and why.

It could be a new web site, a technique are just found.  You don’t have to start with work stuff,  a great pub, coffee shop or just a inspirational tale sets the tone.

Promoting Failure

You know from a design view point, success is good.  But failure is better.

The ultimate is showing others how a process failed, and also why it failed.

One day someone will get up at a conference and say, “My project failed, this is the journey and the lessons learnt”, it will be honest and from the heart.  As an Industry we need more of this.

The point we learn will be invaluable. They’ll save us from making the same mistakes. Save us pain, allow us to not waste time.  This sharing may even promote discussions on the technique in question.

It’s a simple thing really  - as we learn from each others failures we are able to move the UX industry forward at a greater rate.

Does the UX community share and build on each others work?

Backend devs do this,  Front end coders do this,  Visual designers even do this.  Do we – no.

We need to be like  this laptop sized  table refrigerator manufacture and shout about our failures.

Maybe we need a community site, somewhere to show our success and failure, anonymously if you like.

So you don’t have failures – show me a designer that has no failures and I’ll show you a liar.

Showing the Process

You know we shouldn’t just leave it there, we should show our processes, our thinking too.

As a UX community we need to be brave and show our documentation, (clients willing).

What do we have to really loose.

Sometimes we need to explain the contextual boundaries set we can framework, like the budget level, the time frame and level of resources. After it’s framed we can stand back show it, faults and all.

Success or failure  - showing the process is going to help us all learn.  It’s also going to help us be inspired and steal from each others documentation methods and techniques. After all UX design is all about stealing.

Which is good! After all design is always about iteration and referencing previous works for inspiration, like any creative industry.

Sadly in the UX field there often isn’t the chance to do this inspirational iteration.  Why?

Business Reality

From a business view you make think this stupid. After all you don’t want the other guy to have any advantage at all.

You want him to fail, maybe to fall down, better yet for him to go out of business and maybe leave the industry or come work for you.   You want him removed as competition.

So why would you tell anyone your secrets, your processes in details, your failures, your weaknesses.

After all isn’t business just war!

Allowing Community Learning

It’s also very ego-centric and self-serving.   Are you really that type of person?

Alternatively you can consider the bigger picture beyond the microcosm of business.   Look at the UX community, support them.

For most of us we have learnt at least some of our skills from people who have passed on their secrets for a reduced cost or for free.

Now what  would have happened if they hadn’t done this.   Imagine the cost and slow pace of UX best  practice if no one contribed to the community in the first place.

Ask yourself why haven’t you shared the details of your successes and failures.   Why are you hiding all that knowledge? Isn’t it time to give it back?

This most recent redesign seems to have taken that last final leap towards a customer centric service, leaving the stuffy old school bank image behind.

Keeping it Simple.

The main thing that really hits you on the home page (see below) is that the site has been simplified. Making the Search function a key element over the site structure.   Pushing aside the minor items and focusing directly on the major functions people are visiting the site for. In this case focusing on the online banking.

Overall in general terms the site is easy to use.

The site is simple, streamlined back to the core functions, something a good number of other corporate site could do with considering.

Bankwest Home Page March 2011

It’s Not Perfect.

However it’s not all rosy, after a few minutes on the site a good number of issues became apparent.  Here are just a few.

From an accessibility view point Bankwest is failing in its legal obligation, which I find very interesting considering they are displaying an accessibility statement.

For instance the search form could have done with using fieldsets and having a label for the search field.

Looking at the source code is going to make any web professional cry.   It’s a mash of div soup with inline styling and javascript called within the body using old school methods, and not an unobtrusive script in sight.  This is a shame, here you have what is clearly a good interactive design, but it just has a poor implementation.

Bankwest second tier page example with closed information boxes March 2011

The site is made up of three tiers or levels of distinct pages styles.

A really good aspect of the site is its responsive design (not fully extended to the tablet level yet).  It fails on the ipad portrait display and rotation back to landscape.  But this really isn’t a major issue.

Also have the core of the navigation is on the left in two tiers, again breaks the corporate mold.

Accessibility and Readability

I have however noted there is no use of ARIA (for accessibility) within the site at all.  Which is a shame as using ARIA roles is really easy to implement.

I also suspect that the design team working for Bankwest are all under 35, as a lot of the visual accessibility issues would have been picked up otherwise.

One major issue is the use of text over image backgrounds. Even with the ghosted colour fills, there is still a problem with the readability of the text.

First off this is going to be hard for anyone over forty to read quickly.  Remember reading quickly is a thing we tend to do on the web.

Also people with any cognitive issues, which includes the aged, are going to have an issue reading these sections as well.

This readability issue gets worse with the smaller header and footer menus. Having a roll over background doesn’t really help if you can’t work out  what the menu item is in the first place.

Consistency and Layout

Their are a few layout issues as well with lack of space for long titles on menus. Again it seems the implementation team wasn’t talking with the user experience team, which is a little sad.

I would be interested in knowing what the usability testing outcomes were for the positioning of the online banking login menu at a lower level.  As it’s a little hard to locate.   I would have recommended the colours and design be consist through out the site. Continuing on from the home page.

Bankwest second tier page example March 2011

Good with the Bad.

A good aspect is the use of the micro pages revealed via the tabs, this is a good example of streamlining the content down to minimal amount to inform the customer.

However looking at the code, these elements are hidden by a display:none. Making these hidden elements inaccessibility to screen readers. This is a major issue.  A better way would have been to clip or reduce the height of the hidden text areas.

Bankwest second tier page example with automatic menu closure - March 2011

Don’t Use On Hover

Another issue occurs when the screen is reduced in width –  the top menu reduces down to small sidebar.   Now the problem is this sidebar, automatically expands on rolling the cursor over the home button to the left (see above).

Not a problem you think, saves you a mouse click.

Think again, maybe I didn’t want the menu to expand, what if I have shaking hands this will make it very hard for me to use this part of the site.   Again an issue for ageing customers and the like.

Using a click would have been a better alternative.

The Happy Banking Tab.

Minor issues also result from visual confusion, for example the Happy Banking (bottom left) looks like a tab, but appears to be just eye candy.   Makes you feel a little stupid when you go to click on it, and nothing happens.

It turns out this tab expands when you save a product.   Okay that’s good, but how to I close it – using the standard X button.

But  it takes a while to work out how to reopen it!  You use the star at the bottom of the screen – yes it did take me a while to see that.

This functionality should have had two or three ways to achieve this open / closing of the hidden region, for instance using the tab itself.

Bankwest third tier page example March 2011

The Lower Pages.

The final tier of pages relate to the product detail pages, these are well presented with only a few minor issues, in general the design is good example of getting the lower level content right, especially if you consider these pages are the final sell of the products to the customer.

Now the star of the product pages is the credit card accounts page.  You can compare and build your own comparison matrix dynamically, this is a wonderful little tool and shows just the type of thing that is possible.

Give Bankwest some Feedback.

Now this is just a quick review, but you can also provide Bankwest feedback on their new site too.

So it you think it’s cool or trash, go tell them.   Big ups for Bankwest being open and taking on board the customers views.

Now I’m not expecting Bankwest to even read this post,  be nice if the relevant people did; as this information has been provided to help them improve.  Consider this a little free professional feedback from someone that works in the area of user experience, interface design and accessibility on a daily basis.

Oh and Bankwest if you want to discuss this with me, you  can contact me at radharc.

* – Disclaimer I am a Bankwest customer, however in many ways that makes me very critical of anything Bankwest does.

It’s become apparent we really aren’t focusing much on the accessibility needs of our aged population; and by aged I’m dumping middle-aged people like me in that group to – that’s anyone 40+.

Now I’m well on the way to being truly on the wrong side of 40, so these accessibly issues are starting to become noticeable day to day on a personal level. So this issue is a little personal.

By focusing on the aged community is not t to say we should ignore the needs of the traditional accessibility community.  Just let’s give some consideration to the aged people too.

Aged Used of the Web

The concern over the myths that have developed over the way people in the mature aged community (the silver surfers) use the web.

The truth may surprise you.

Roger Hudson has discovered things are not as we assumed.  I recommend that you have a read of his outcomes of a little research he has been doing into how mature aged people use ITC.  It’s a bit of an eye opener.

Of particular interest is the low use the ITC by the general mature aged community.   And their use, or lack thereof,  of the increase/decrease font size button.

I had suspected this from general user testing.   I even have a suspicion that this extends to the general non tech savvy public as well.

Allowing for the Aged

We really need to be stepping up and making allowance for the aged community. From a business perspective this is going to become a mandated issue, as the baby boomer population gets older.

In reality if you are really making a go at the accessibility issues for the traditional web accessibility community that you are by chance also catering for the aged community as well.

The differentating factor for the aged community is it has a number of combined issues across the entire gambit of the accessibility areas, such as:

• Cognitive memory recall issues, filling in forms, recalling.
• Cognitive processing issues, need information in smaller chunks.
• Manual dexterity issues, exspecially in hands and fingers, using mouse and keyboard, clicking on buttons.
• Manual coordination issues – use of dynamic elements of the site
• Fading hearing,  captioning or at least a transcript.
• Close in vision focus issues, making reading anything on the screen that is small harder.
• Vision colour contrast issues, making some coloured items harder to distinguish.

More information on this can be found from the W3C Web Accessibility for Older Users and the WAI-AGE Project.

So next time you are designing a site and you don’t think any of the old farts will be using your hip new site. Think again as the middled aged generation will be there knocking on your door.

They have money and attitude and aren’t getting any younger.   Where is my turbo zimmer-frame.