The Vostok blog

I just turned off Buzz.

It took me a while to understand why I didn’t like it and then I realised it’s quite a simple reason. Google Buzz, like Twitter or Facebook are for entertainment while Gmail is mostly work.

When I want to concentrate I usually shut down anything distracting and focus on what I may be doing whereas it’s sketching, designing, writing emails, proposals, etc. I usually have a break every 10-15 minutes. Something short, just to check my planetaki, twitter and perhaps facebook (that happens less often). Everything is on separate tabs so work and distractions don’t get messed.

And then came Buzz with this bold number of “buzzs” right next to the number of messages in my inbox so every time I checked if there was eny new email I’d see that there was some fun going on at the Buzz Cantina and I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t have my Continuous Partial Attention the way it was supposed to be, in moderate intervals.

And friends, that is why I am shutting down buzz. Not because I don’t like it (in fact I really hate facebook for what it has and Buzz lacks) but because it’s too invasive, just like my friends throwing a party at our studio at office hours.

Minube, a Spanish and French online website where travellers share info about travel destinations, just released their printable traveller guides, which are basically travel guides with user comments, pictures and maps from the place you chose based on your selected categories, tags, etc.

We, Vostok, helped minube designing the creation and personalisation process which you can see on this post at the Minube blog (Spanish).

Ah, here’s an example of what a guide looks like (pdf). Pretty awesome. Congrats to the minube guys!

This presentation supports my idea about the typical usability tests: they usually suck, they are worthless and almost always done by people who know nothing about design (and try to make a virtue of it).

Check it out, please:

How could they dare extracting usability conclusions based on first usage? How can they say things like “One participant actually thought that…

These kind of tests make me feel that either…

a) most users are stupid
b) most of the so called “usability engineers” are stupid
c) most u-tests are totally useless and worthless

I know, this is a total rant but… jesus!! I am so getting tired of the usual “usability thing”…

Check this out:

Now, this is what I call design. Or at least is the kind of design that I do on a regular basis.

Many of my clients come with their own “remote controls” crammed with dozens of buttons. My job is to decide which ones get hidden, which of them remain and how to sort them out. I’ll eventually add something, but that is not usually the case. That’s why I like o say that I am not good at inventing stuff but at improving it.

I saw the picture at Makememinimal, I think I am going to save it for an ocasional presentation. It’s a good way of explaining my job

Hey Facebook’s usability manager, shame on you!!

Youtube’s ActiveSharing seems to me like a failed attempt (another one!) to kick the social and sharing side of their website. This is how they explain it:

Are you a video trendsetter, an expert at finding the cool stuff on YouTube? Now you can share what you find immediately by Active Sharing with other YouTube users.

Click the “Start Active Sharing” button, then go watch some videos. Your username will show up on the page of the videos as you watch them, and a list of the latest ones you’ve seen will appear in your profile.

I don’t think that such a small feature deserves so much explanation, activation and even a name (ActiveSharing). It could be because Youtube guys want to feature something that will be surrounded by a bunch of other confusing features. I think that removing some functionality would be a better strategy than adding more stuff to the mess.

My suggestion if you want to share videos with your friends is to use Unvlog, especially now that it has an English version. Way clearer, simpler, smarter, nicer and to the point.

The City of Madrid’s website (munimadrid.es) has been ranked the most usable of all municipal governance websites in the world in a study commissioned by United Nations and conducted by Rutgers University. Madrid also ranks very high in other categories, being the 5th best overall.

This makes me very proud since I lead the team who made that possible. I guess I cannot disclose much of the information regarding the project, but I want to congratulate and thank the team who worked really hard to make it possible. We weren’t expecting such success.

Here is the press release and a link to a United Nations page with the full report.

Here is the overall ranking:

This is the detail on the usability category:

This is the paragraph where Madrid’s website is mentioned as one of the best practices all over the world:

Working for the public administration is always dificult. There are many interests and stakeholders which sometimes conflict among themselves and you feel in the middle having to come up with something that compromises all parts and is also what you think it’s best for users. I don’t recall it as an easy project.

Besides, as a professional you have to deliver a plus when working in such projects. Why? For two main reasons:

1. You are being paid with everybody’s money
2. Your users are the Citizens. You work for the public good.

I remember recalling these principles when things used to get tough. It was our big motivation. Now I see it was worth the sacrifice.

I found Juan Leal’s post about Verplank’s definition on Interaction Desing very interesting, although I am no fan of definitions and compartimentations. I’ll jump to the train, however.

My favorite definition/description/whatever goes like this:

Information Architecture: how it’s structured
Interaction Design: how it behaves
Information Design/Visual Design: how it looks

These definitions are not mine and I cannot recall who wrote them first. I’d appreciate any feedback on it. I am also aware that the boudaries between concepts are not clear at all, especially between the last two. They tend to overlap a lot.

Silverback is already out. What is special about it? Well, it’s basically a software to merge the captured interaction of a user on the screen with the recording of his face, all in one screen for easier test usability documentation.

On the typical usability test set-up you have the usual screen pointing to users’ face and also some camtasia-like software for recording what goes on the screen. Then you dream of merging it together to create a killer DVD for your client but actually never do so because of the time it would take to review both tapes, digitalise and do the necessary video edition.

I am a big fan of contextualised user testing: doing the testing as close to the real user environment as possible. This really makes it easier. Taking advantage of the Mac computer which usually has an embeded webcam, makes the test way less intimidating for the user.

The solution is so clever I wonder why nobody did it before. Congrats to the guys at Clearleft. I may use it soon.