New UK coins

This one comes from a friend, Jose Marconi who told me about the new coin designs. I've been so busy with the writing of my thesis that I haven't even noticed that the coins were changed...

There has been a lot of discussion about the new designs, most people moaning about it rather than liking it I'm afraid (see some comments here). Changing the currency always makes people assume a conservative posture. Believe me... I know... Brazil has changed currency many times and every single time the population moaned, shouted, protested but in the end accepted it. Come the time for a next currency change, people had grown so attached to the money (forgetting how much they hated it in the first place) that they were averse to changing it.

Back to the UK, on one side, the new coins depict the Royal Shield of Arms either in its whole (pound coin) or in part. On the other side, they show, as usual, the face of the Queen. Below there is a quote from the designer explaining the concept (for the full text click here).

"I thought the six coins could make up a shield by arranging the coins both horizontally, as with the landscape idea, as well as vertically, in a sort of jigsaw style. I liked the idea and symbolism of using the Royal Arms, where individually the coins could focus on specific elements and when placed together they reveal the complete Royal Arms.

I found the idea that members of the public could interact with the coins the most exciting aspect of this concept. It's easy to imagine the coins pushed around a school classroom table or fumbled around with on a bar - being pieced together as a jigsaw and just having fun with them."

The most controversial aspect about the new design seems to be the fact that there are no numbers stamped on the faces. The value of the coin is written (e.g. one, two, five, etc). Here is another picture of the coins in position showing the shield of arms.



Without taking any sides there are, however, some usability and design considerations which need to be taken into account:

1) The new designs are beautiful and a breath of fresh air, there's no doubt about it.
2) The fact that the currency does not have the numbers is a problem. Who ever been abroad has experienced how confusing it can be to use a foreign currency. Now imagine that foreign money with no numbers on it!!

Oh, one may say, 'Bloody foreigners...they should learn english or not come to this country!'. Well, we have to remember that last year alone, tourism brought 86.5 billion pounds into the UK economy!! Spending that much money here, I think tourists shold be considered more thoughtfully on this.

Another may say: 'Well there are still the shapes and colours to guide them, they'll learn'. I do agree that design conventions sometimes have to be broken for innovation to occur. Yes, people struggle a bit initially and then the innovative design becomes the new convention. This process, however, takes some time and remember that tourists do not hang around long enough to transform innovation into new conventions.

3) Why have the words and not the numbers instead? If there was room for the words, certainly there was room for the numbers! Quick check: 'How many of you can read the words 'five pence' in a 5p coin?

Again, one may say:'Well, the pound coin has words and no numbers on it' I ask: 'How many of you know that the words 'one pound' are stamped in the £1 coin?'

Most people eventually learn that that coin which is thicker than the others and sort of golden in colour is worth one pound. But remember that a tourist that only had one (quite distinctive) coin to learn, now has to learn that one and 6 (not so distinctive) coins.

4) Let's be honest...jigzaw puzzle? Who is going to play with that? Kids? What are the odds of kids having one of each coin totaling £1.88 in their pockets. People want to use money to buy things and not to play around.

All in all, as I said before, I think the new design is a breath of fresh air...not the most usable of design of all. People will eventually learn the new conventions and will use the coins automatically. Tourists? Well they will have problems...but they won't probably be life threatening. Who knows? maybe someone will come to senses and put the numbers back in...

Firefox 3 and Fitt's Law

After my last post on the new firefox browser button, some might have thought: Ok, the button is bigger so it's easier to see, but can that be enough to improve the usability of the browser interface?

Well, there is a physical model which establishes the time to acquire a target as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. This model, called Fitts' Law* was first published by Paul Fitts in 1954. The model initially referred to the act of touching a target**, with the advent of graphical user interfaces it has been adapted to pointing and clicking with a mouse.

So, the rational behind the new firefox browser button is this: the position of the button will remain the same (distance to target) so let's increase it's size. With this solution, not only the button is more visible, but according to Fitts' Law, the time to acquire the target should decrease.

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* see the book: Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler, page 82

** See the article: The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement, by Paul Fitts in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, (1954) vol.47, issue 6, pages 381-391.

Applied Usability Research

Those who have already installed Firefox 3.0 could have been as surprised as me with the new design of the Back and forward buttons. The new back button is round and about twice the size of the forward button. Although quite stylish, this design breaks with the conventional layout which web users have grown accustomed to.

This change is in fact a brilliant response to a recurrent usability research result: "When users are navigating, the back button is of the most used browser feature"**.
What was Netscape's solution? Make it bigger than the forward button! Simple! Functional! and visually appealing!


** For more information see:

Catledge L, Pitkow, J. - Characterizing browsing strategies in the World-Wide Web. (http://www.pitkow.com/docs/1995-WWW3-Characterizing.pdf

Stanton, N. A. & Baber, C. - The Myth of Navigating in Hypertext: How a "Bandwagon" Has Lost Its Course!

Google Desktop, here is a good one!!!

Just after I started the blog, I decided to setup Google Desktop. For those not familiar with it, it is like having a google engine on your desktop which can search the files in your hard drive and tell you where they are.

It is a great tool, specially if you are trying to find an article which you want to read or a document you read ages ago which talked about, let's say, 'website genres'. All you have to do is type the words 'website genres' in the neat search field on the windows taskbar and voilá Google Desktop gives you the files which match the search criteria. All sounds very nice, except when you start searching... The problem is, that by default your whole fixed drive (usually C:) is scanned (crawled is the approporiate term) and indexed. This means that you usually get a lot of results (depending on the search, thousands of them). But in my case, I do not want a lot of results! I just want to search the papers and articles I have in a specific folder in my C: drive.

Ahhh, it's simple, just tell Google Desktop that the only place you want it to index is that particular folder!! I wish it was that simple! As far as I could see, there is no way of telling it to scan just a folder in the C: drive! And if it does allow you to do it, the instructions are not easily found.

What you have to do if you want GD to scan just one of your folders is to tell it to exclude all folders from the indexing...except the ones you want to search.

OK, I thought, just open the 'add folder to exclusion list' window, CTRL click on all forlders you want to exclude and I'll be done. WRONG! You can not CTRL click or even SHIFT click...you have to input folder by folder...

Here's a picture of a the first third of excluded folders I had to manually input.
Nice one Google!!!

Long road ahead

It has been more than 15 years since Jakob Nielsen published his 'Usability Engineering' book. in my opinion this book was a landmark in designing products for users.

Although a long time has passed since Mr. Nielsen begun evangelizing the world and many followed his steps, we are still flooded by hard to use products and terrible design.

When I say terrible design, I do not mean aesthetically but in term of user experience. It is very common to have beautifully looking products being rendered useless by not being able to do (or by making it very hard to do) what the user requests.

In this blog I will attempt to discuss all usability issues I come across in my life as a usability researcher and designer...and believe me, I have stories to tell...

Hope you will enjoy it as much as I.