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Ingredients: An elastic eyes-cover and food aluminum paper.

It worked for 10 hours avoiding the cold air directly in my face ;) 

Labels: airplane, Travel, UX

# posted by leovernazza : 10/02/2007 02:18:00 PM  0 comments links to this post

I get very frustrated using the LAN entertainment system because of a stupid failure in the design of its Navigation Model. I want to share it with you, because little things like this are the ones that make the difference between great and bad experiences. In this case, the difference between entertainment and a post with bad-publicity for the company ;)

Interaction with the entertainment system.

I was just looking for some music to help me overtake the 11-hours flight from Los Angeles to Santiago, so I turned on the individual entertainment system I had in front of me. It presented a friendly menu where I selected Audio and then Library. Then it showed an index of categories, and the albums by category at the right pane. As the display wasn't too big (around 10'') the right pane just presented 6 albums, and you had to use the page controls to explore each category in depth. I selected a Massive Attack album that was in the 13th (of 24) page, so, I had to pass 12 pages...

Suggestion #1: The average category had 10 pages and the only way of exploring them was just with a next/previous page control. A scrollbar was best suited for that case (a user that knows where is going can move faster); other solution could be to add a page index (like the one in the Google result page).

But I couldn't listen to the music because after my choice I received a "This selection is currently unavailable. Try again later" error message. 

Rule #1: Be proactive; don't wait for the selection to show the "unavailable" message. If you can, remove (or disable) the unavailable elements before the user have to try them.

After such an imprecise error message I couldn't realize what the problem was, but anyway I was ready to try with another album. But for my surprise, after the message I had to start from scratch again because I was redirected to the Home screen!!! Why? Is this a kind of penalty for trying to listen to Massive Attack? Well... ok, I made the whole process again and selected the Jack Johnson's album In Between Dreams... but I had the same problem again. So, I desisted and continued with the book.

Rule #2: Never redirect your user to the home page unless there is no other choice. Try to conserve the context always.

It this case, the obvious decision is redirecting the user back to the album selection screen remembering the category and the page (that is, doing a good BACK). I didn't count the clicks I needed to get frustrated but they were surely around 30. In this case, 15 clicks in average each time you want to pick a song added to a intriguingly high response time... seems a little expensive for an application with a so bounded functionality.

Navigation Modes. Above is the suggested, below the current.

From my point of view, the problem that derived the current design of the system is obvious: it is a clear case of a stupidly-use-case-driven-application. I can see the analyst writing the Play Album Use Case: "...if I can't play the album, show error. Then, end".

Rule #3: Think always in the step after the end of a use case, both in success and failure scenarios.

Actually, this rule is the opportunistic link pattern put in other words. For instance, after you complete the buy process in Amazon, they provide you similar items to continue buying. The opposite is to present a "Thank you for buying in Amazon message" where the only choice for the user is to close the browser, that is what the entertainment system does.

There are many examples out there of stupidly-use-case-driven-applications, one that always surprised me during my university days was the Beadleship's site where you had to log into the system twice if you wanted to inscribe for two courses... the use case should be something like: the user select Inscriptions from the menu, then enters his user and password, then select the course, end.

Labels: airplane, Travel, Usability, Usability cookie

# posted by leovernazza : 9/09/2007 10:56:00 AM  2 comments links to this post

I am traveling to Seoul (South Korea) to present "HIMALIA: Model-Driven User Interfaces Using Hypermedia, Controls And Patterns" in the first workshop on Model-Driven User-Centered Engineering 2007. The presentation is programmed to be on September 5 at 14:00hs, after the launch. I am expecting to meet interesting people there, and have some productive interchange with other similar-fields researchers to enrich ourselves.

I made this map to show the straight and VERY LONG flight. It is difficult to measure the amount of time on-the-fly because of the different time zones, but in any case, it isn't less than 30 hours!!! I hope not to experience very much jet lag, but I think it will be impossible to distinguish between jet lag and 30 hours of flight ;) 

So, don't expect very much activity in this blog from 1st to 9th September. I will share the photos and surely some comments when I came back home.

BTW, if someone knows the people in the DICyT, could you hurry up them? I sent them an one-page-letter three weeks ago, but they didn't have enough time to see it yet... came on! it's one page! They should be receiving like 1000 letters a day to argue that, and I don't think it's the case.

Labels: Acedemic, Conference, Himalia, MDUCDE, Travel

# posted by leovernazza : 8/16/2007 03:21:00 PM  0 comments links to this post

Microsoft (through Wilson Pais) invited me to talk in the first Architect Forum of the year in Santiago de Chile.

I also used this opportunity to visit a friend of mine who lives there, Hugo Cortés. I meet him for first time in March 2004 when he come to Montevideo -as a member of Un Techo Para Chile- and helped us to create Un Techo Para Uruguay, a non-governmental organization that help houseless people in my country. I'm outside the organization now (because you can't do everything at the same time), but I really feel as a member of it... technically, I'm one of the founders ;)

Back to the Architect Forum, Alejandro Pacheco made a discussion about the available technologies for the presentation layer. After that, Martín Cabrera introduced Domain-Specific Languages, and showed a mini-example. Then I presented Himalia and finally, Carlos Carminati and Luis Molfino presented their company and what are they doing.

In the picture, from left to right, you can see to Martín Cabrera (Microsoft), Carlos Carminati (d2B), Luis Molfino (d2B), Alejandro Pacheco (Microsoft) and me. 

My presentation was specially discussed with the people, so I think they enjoyed it ;) I already know that the Himalia proposal is disrupting, and it's great when people keep thinking about these ideas.

This photo was taken by Luis Molfino, as you can see he's an artist :)

I want to thank you to Martín Cabrera and all the Microsoft Chile team. Surely we will meet again in the near future...

Labels: DSL Tools, Himalia, Talk, Travel, WPF

# posted by leovernazza : 3/06/2007 12:55:00 AM  0 comments links to this post