Whenever riding the subway you will realise quickly if you are surrounded by experienced users or not. Experienced everyday users can be mainly met during rush hour, will move into the aisles quickly and voluntarly, they will keep the doors free to close and will move out of the way to let someone pass who wants to get off. They learned through years of experience that it goes faster and smoother this way. As opposed to newbies or less frequent user one will meet in the subway on a sunday afternoon. They are not as practiced and in the eyes of an old seasoned traveller will do everything wrong and therefore make his experience less enjoyable.

Just a little thing to keep in mind when designing products. You always (at least almost) have those two groups. Try to accomodate both. Easy access and start for those who only come by once a year. Expert features and shortcuts for those who know their way around and know what they are doing.

Unfortunately there is no experts only area on the subway.

People who now me a little know I am crazy about all kinds of packaging design and a nice packaging with a twist will always make me buy.
So I was delighted when I recently found that on a can of beer.
Chill until blue! Comes with a little temperature sensor.
The snowflake turns blue once the beer is cold and will fade back to white/transparent when you drink too slow and the beer turns warm again.
It made us play and wonder why blue and why a snowflake.
Looking at colour history blue not always represented cold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue#Variations but certainly has this meaning today. Water taps, themometers, car aircondition - blue equals cold.
And the snowflake is kinda selfexplaining. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake#Use_as_a_symbol even though I did not know it was the symbol of the Olympic games 2002 and first thought about tyres and then about Christmas but that might be only my way of thinking.
So the feature works fine, the colour coding at least for Europe is fine but the question stays why did the producer put it on.
Does it actually push sales. Are there enough people out there who would chose a beer for packaging over taste.
Does it do its job within the packaging design to be an eyecatcher and support the spontaneous descision 60% of shoppers make in front of the shelf? Or is there another more long term oriented reason behind it. Does it bind customers to the product maybe because they like and use that little feature? Are their cliques where there are inside jokes based on the blue snowflake on their favorite beer. Just wondering...

It's still kinda dark. We are walking through the silent streets.
Still tired, quiet. Our footsteps in the fresh snow, little else. The
city about to wake up creates this feeling of a special occasion. We
are heading towards Le Pain Quotidien. Best breakfast in town. Passing
soon to be busy restaurants, where the staff has gathered around a
corner table enjoying their moment of peace. Market stalls lit up,
still in the process of being prepared for another busy day. Covered
in plastic that protects the vegetables from the cold and snow. They
seem like ghosts this way.
The owner has to unlook the door for us. It smells of fresh bread and
coffee. Le Pain Quotidien we discovered on a holiday in Zurich and for
us it is the perfect brekfast experience. Happy to see them in Munich
now. I had the one and only perfect boiled egg in Zurich and was now
here to see if the holiday experience could be transfered to home. It
could, absolutely no disappointment there. It worked. And things that
work on holiday seldom work back home. Things taste different, smell
different, the surrondings are different.
Pain Quotidien for us does the perfect franchise job. Keep it
constant, make it work the same everywhere. As for us it is connnected
to this holiday experience it works perfectly.
I will let you know if it is repeatable.
Have a nice day.

People tend to use things the way they need them no matter what the designer's intention was. I like the thought. We can steer them through good user experiece design but in the end their free will succeds and if the wish or rather the motivation is big enough they will find a way. I recently watched a nice little version of that right in my office.
We moved office and for some reason the drawer that usually sits underneath the desk ended up next to it. I guess they needed the space underneath to access network cables and stuff. So people walking into our office to talk to me started sitting on it. It happened right away and equally to almost everybody. We do have chairs and a little desk for guests but no they all prefer the drawer. They walk in, see the drawer, sit and stay that little bit longer. Sometimes it stops me from working but most of the time I get this little bit more information that can be so incredibly helpful. Nowadays everybody seems used to it. And people tend to get irritated if i have my bag sitting on the drawer. As it is not a place meant for them they can't complain. But I can witness their irritation when they walk in expecting to sit with me and then can't. Reactions differ from simply standing to getting a chair. Most people will simply say what they wanted in short words and leave again. So I guess I will leave it where it is. Maybe I will even put a cushion on it to make clear it is meant that way.

Whenever I enter a hardware store I have the urge to get out a pair of
hand cuffs, find a sales person and tie him to my wrist. So he is
always there when I get lost in the endless aisles where logic wasn't
present when the shelfes were filled. Or when I can't figure out which
norm describes what and which tool I really need. Or when once again
everything is just available in sets.
I dream of that personal sales persons mostly in hardware stores. I
guess it is because they are that damn huge and most of us are
entering unknown territory when stepping in. But even in a supermarket
you don't go to regulary it would be quite convenient. There are those
typical items like eggs that don't fit the classical supermarket logic
and therefore will be whereever was a bit space available.
I think one can find many paralells to those shopping experiences when
designing navigation for websites. You will always have different
audiences:
Those who are very familiar with your product and return regularly and
those more insecure who only come from time to time or are there for
the first time.
Your navigation and guidance should be for them all. Quick, efficient
and unobstrusive for the pros. Guiding, step by step helping to get to
the goal for the rest.
So keep those handcuffs in mind.

Whenever you talk to someone driving a VW Multivan no matter if it is the new T5 or the older T4 he will complain about that thing in the middle of the back seat that turns into your bed. That hard beam right where your hip will be when sleeping. Even people who only ever slept in a VW Multivan for one night of their lives will tell you the same story.
If you randomly choose any of the VW Multivan forums around this planet you will find many posts about this very topic. Hacks on how to get it comfortable nevertheless without driving additional matresses around. The offered solution are numerous. They reach from inflatable matresses to handmade foam puzzels you have to put on the seats to make it even and comfy to sleep on.
http://www.t4forum.de/wbb2//thread.php?threadid=72177&threadview=1&hilight=&hilightuser=0&sid=c6c85e00e2799b5c120f8640587b92db#post1028341
There are even professional companies offering products to solve the problem. Brandup sells a kind of matress that is like the negative of the original seat and will level it when put on.
http://www.brandrup.de/?lang=de&page=produkt_fzg_innen_ixtend
And here I am wondering why VW never tried to fix that.
They must know. Everybody who has ever visited a VW forum or talked to someone driving a multivan will be aware of the problem. It is simply not possible that they don't know.
So I am wondering did they choose to ignore it, was the use case just not important enough for them to pay attention to it in the development. I would argue that as it is a multivan and it is made to sleep in it and thousands of people on this planet use it for exactly that every day.
Was it even a good decision not to lose focus through those complaints?
I would like to pose that as a general question?
When should one react to user complaints?
37 signals always stresses to at first deny any feature request not to lose focus.
Apple is as good as it is because they focus and do not answer to every cry for more.
But when does a feature request become important enough so you should consider fixing it?
Are many complaints in forums a reason to react. Is it a reason to react when it seems to be the first thing that comes to mind when asked abotu the user experience of the product?
Or are there even then reasons not to do it?

FAQs.
Been updating some lately getting into a lot of discussions if that is necessary and useful.
One argument would be "if we get the user experience right we don't need them". We will provide the support to the user when he needs it where he needs it. No need to get him out of the flow and point him to FAQs. On the other hand side there will always be the kinda user who wants to read a "how to" in more detail. And in the end there is the customer support who wants a page to point the user to.
So I started to look around. What has happened to the former star? In the early days a site without a decent set of FAQs couldn't exist.
There were FAQs for almost everything. Made sense at the time where there were more first timers. Technology wasn't providing the options it does today. So in page help was harder to achieve.

FAQs always came in two versions:
They either explained to you how to use the site and what to do or they gave you an overview what the company whose site you were looking at could do for you.

The what can we do for you part often has been replaced by the classical 1-2-3 we find on so many start up homepages today.
Like foursquare with: Check in - Find your friends - Unloock your city http://foursquare.com/ or http://www.mint.com/ with a bit more detail for the following areas: understand your money, all your accounts in one place, easy budgeting tool, find instant savings, safe and secure.
I dare to say here only a different way of presenting became more fashionable. Good old FAQs did a similar thing for the user.
But what about those FAQs explaining to you how a site works.
Today you can still find them. Most bigger portals still have them. Often deep down somewhere in the footer but they are still there.
Often supported by screencasst and video tutorials but still there.
So it seems despite all in page help, better user experience and a strong focus on usabilty there comes the moment where they are still necessary.
What do you thing?
Is it a bad sign if you need them?

One can have different opinions on how good or bad it is that a lot of us are living their life completly in public, posting the most intimate details on Facebook and Twitter - open for everyone to read including a future boss and the ex boyfriend. Even if we sometimes think - ouch I did not need to know that or get bored by the same complaints about late planes or bad coffee we have to read through, most of us would agree that all that usually is highly entertaining and more often than not helpful to stay in touch, take part in other peoples lifes and catch the news.

I was the same opinion until the other morning.

I opened facebook and right their on top of my newsfeed a status update form a friend's mother. Or rather someone had added her date of death and her wall was full of condolences. I read my way through the wall and jumped to her daughter's profile, slowly getting the puzzle together. Apparently a close friend had used her login to post the information about the fatal accident on her profile and people started reacting.

But what would my reaction be. The friend living at the other end of the world - we only used facebook for a lose contact. Under normal circumstances I probably would not have found out until way later. What to do know. Accept what a lot of people apparently considered ok and right my condolences on an public wall on facebook? Use a private message? Not react at all?

It felt strange and wrong but on the other hand this was where we always communicated - why switch now?

The final decision came fast as my news feed started telling me that new people now were friends with my friends dead mother. This finally drove me away. I logged of and retreated to other means of communication that seemed way more suitable in such a moment.

 

But what does that really tell us?

Is that acceptable? Apparently a lot of people, except me, thought so.

If we are putting all our life out there is it ok to do it with death as well. Am I overreacting?

All the information came straight from family or close friends. It did not seem like that wasn't wanted by the family but still it feels strange.

Will this become a normal use case in our online behaviour?

Will there be a start up picking up this idea?

Leaves me wondering and doubting once again.