Some Research on User Interface Standards

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The Task

I have been asked to put together a working group to put together user interface standards. Initial discussions are that we will need to come up with different standards for different environments, like portal sites, websites, custom applications, mobile applications and off the shelf applications. So… I have done some research on the areas of user interface standards, usability, and user experience.

Some Definitions

Wikipedia was a big help. Here is what I found there.

  • User Interface – also known as Human Computer Interface, user interface is the aggregate of means by which people interact with the system. The user interface provides means of input ( allowing the users to manipulate a system) and output (allowing the system to indicate the effects of the users’ manipulation)
  • Usability – the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal
  • User Experience – a term used to describe the overarching experience a person has as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service
  • Human Interface –

Existing Standards

I know this is material that has been covered by other companies. Here is what I have found available that other groups have compiled.

Other Standards

These are some other user interface standards that I have heard mentioned in other articles onbline, but could not find any links directly to them.

  • DIN 66234 part 8 standard – 1988
  • The Data Company’s standard
  • Motif™ style guide [OSF 1990] 167
  • OPEN LOOK™ [Sun Microsystems 1990] 404
  • Smith and Mosier [1986] guidelines 485

Conferences

These seem like two promising conferences about user web usability.

Organizations

Here are two organizations I found that focus on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and usability. I hav just joined the UPA, and plan on re-joining the ACM.

Books

Amazon is a cornucopia of information on user interface standards, usability, and user experience. I have most of these books, and plan on getting the others soon.

Link Roll

Lots of good sites out there about usability and user experience.

If there are any sources that you use that I have not included, please leave a comment and let me know what it is.

Virtumonde is not your friend

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I was the victim of a very annoying piece of malware. I have been avoiding the corporate install of Internet Explorer for months now, and I have been using Firefox 2 and 3 instead. I am sure I was doing something I should not have been, because for the last two weeks these strange popups have been plaguing my Firefox browsers, and my machine has been running like there was taffy on my hard drive. I tried to remove the trojan with Spybot S&D, and that did not work. It did identify a Browser Helper Object (BHO) and some registry entries that I could not get rid of. That is when I knew it would be bad. Derek recommended that I try Macafee Avert Stinger. That was no help either. I tried HijackThis. That was informative, but not as helpful as I had hoped. So I did some more digging online, and an article recommended Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware (MBAM). That was a big step forward. It clearly identified my problem as the Virtumonde Trojan. There were 59 DLLs, BHOs, data files, and registry entries all over my computer from this one trojan. I used MBAM to remove all of them, but the BHO registry entry was stubborn. This meant there was still more. I did some research on Virtumonde, and found that a tool called ComboFix will wipe it out entirely. It took about 20 minutes to run, rebooted my machine, and took another 20 minutes to complete. But when it was all done, I was trojan free. No more popups when I use Firefox, and my machine is fast again. Now… if only I knew what I did that was so bad…

Techno-Christmas 2008

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Well, another Christmas has come and gone, and we have all exchanged our gifts. Everyone in the family got new gadgets to alleviate their tech addiction.

Nicholas got his long-overdue Xbox 360. We bought him the Elite version, with the wireless remote and the 120GB hard drive. Can’t get a new console without a shiny new game too, right? So we got him one of his favorites… the new NHL 2K9. He also got lots of gift cards, so that he could go out and get a game of his choice. He picked up Call of Duty 4, and another wireless remote, so that he can pwn me and his friends up in NHL 2K9 or Call of Duty.

Mary Ann was light on the technology this year… she did get some CDs that would help her learn basic Dutch in the car on her long commute to work every morning.

I was burned by the HD-DVD fiasco last Christmas, so this year my wife bought me the Sony BDP-S350 Blu-Ray Disc Player. And, just like the Xbox, you can’t get a new Blu-ray player without getting a couple new Blu-ray movies. My parents bought me Iron Man and Wall-E.

The great thing about technology is the same as the problem with technology. It is always improving. The Harmon Kardon receiver we had for 6 years or so has no HDMI inputs or outputs. I had been using direct component connections to the TV, but I ran out of those too, with all the different HD devices I have now. So I had to treat myself with a new Sony STR-DG820 A/V Reciever. Yay for 4 HDMI inputs! It only took 30 minutes to set up with my speakers and all the devices.

And with all that technology, I was able to watch Rutgers beat NC State 29-23 in the 2008 PapaJohns.com Bowl. RU Rah Rah!

Analytics Tool Wars – Dodge, Parry, Thrust, Spin!

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On October 10, Yahoo! launched their new free analytics tool named Yahoo Web Analytics, a rebrand of IndexTools which Yahoo purchased earlier this April. This isn’t very different than Google’s move to buy Urchin in 2005, refine it, and make it available free to the public. However, what is different between Yahoo’s analytics tool and Google’s tool is that Yahoo is not aggregating the data. This is important enough to say it again… you are not analyzing aggregated data with Yahoo. They store all their data in its raw form, allowing for real-time reporting. This is why some think that the two products do not really compete against each other, because they target different audiences.

Not to be outdone, Google announced on October 22 that they were releasing an “Enterprise” feature upgrade to their product. This upgrade includes custom reports, advanced segmentation, an API for developers, updated interface, motion charts, and integration with Google AdSense.

Was Google resting on its laurels, and now feels threatened by the new Yahoo product? Did Google release these new features to combat the release of Yahoo Web Analytics? Could be. It would be interesting to track the number of users of each of these two products over time, just like we track the number of browser users and the number of search engine users.

Visual Thesaurus Bends and Stretches Your Way to Synonyms

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I have stayed connected to the search industry ever since I was involved with the original launch of the Pravachol web site ten years ago. One of the ways I have stayed connected is through great online resources like Alt Search Engines. This week they covered a great new online tool that helps its users search for synonyms. Visual Thesaurus displays entries in the thesaurus graphically and separates them into individual entries through a tool called Thinkmap. This is very similar to the technology used in the TouchGraph Google Browser. Both of these technologies are similar to some of the social networking graphs that are used in Web 2.0 sites. Take a look at the new Visual Thesaurus, and the TouchGraph Google Browser, and let me know what you think of the usage of thetechnology, and what other ways you might like to see it.

3 SEO Site Analysis Tools to Grade Your Site

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I don’t usually do this, but this blog entry will be about an email I received from one of my readers. I got an email from Rachel, who works at a company called SEO Site Checkup. She asked me to take a look at their site. They have created a simple-to-use web site that will analyze your site against a series of SEO based rules. All you do is put in your URL, submit, and let the site do its work. It will return a list of important fixes, recommended fixes, and successful checks. It provides a lot of information, and a great deal of next steps to make your site more SEO friendly. In fact, it was good enough to point out a few changes that we will want to make to some of our major brand sites.

To be fair, there are two other tools that I use in the web site SEO analysis space. WebSite Grader is provided by HubSpot – a company focusing on marketing for small companies. I have also used a site called XinuReturns, which will help you “Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics.”

XinuReturns focuses more on aspects outside of your site, including inbound links, search engine results, and social bookmarking. WebSite Grader gives a high level overview of lots of different aspects of your site’s SEO, both internally and externally, and gives you an easy “grade” to compare results against other sites. The strength of SEO Site Checkup over these other two sites is is that it takes a deep dive into aspects of your web site that you can change to improve your search results. It analyzes your technology and your content, and gives you an action plan for improvement. All three tools are a great way to measure your site’s SEO, but SEO Site Checkup goes the next step further to tell you how to improve those measurements.

I recommend using all three of these tools, in conjunction with analytics tools and other metrics to montiro and improve your site. SEO Site Checkup is a great new tool to add to that arsenal.

Software Metrics

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Being able to measure success for a software development group is a difficult thing. But not being able to show the success of your development group is a dangerous thing. Your management team will want to be able to measure quality, show improvement, and benchmark against industry standards. All the popular maturity models (if you put stock into them) emphasize the ability to measure, react, and improve your quality and processes. My department is no different. We try to remain as flexible and lightweight as possible, and add formality where improvement is necessary. Here are some of the metrics that we collect to measure our success and find ares of improvement.

Code Coverage

There will always be bugs. No matter how hard you try, there will always be bugs in your software. That does not mean that you cannot try to prevent them. One of the easiest ways to do that is to write automated unit tests to validate your code is doing what is expected. You can write your unit tests lots of different ways, and Steve Cornett’s Code Coverage Analysis paper gives lots of different ways to break down code coverage. A great place to start is to aim for 50% coverage of all of your lines of code. And, as Tony Obermeit says in his Code Coverage Lessons paper, your ultimate goal of course is to always hit 100% coverage. You will need to pick a code coverage tool to help measure your success. In my department, developing in a Visual Studio and C# environment lends itself to the nCover open source solution. This solution works well with our CruiseControl environment. Test Driven Development methodologies and mocking tools can help you get closer and closer to covering as much of your code as possible with automated tests.

Defect Tracking

I use the words defects and bugs interchangeably. This I am sure is something that some people would disagree with, but I think that it is close enough. If it is not working as expected, then it is a defect, and it is a bug. Regardless, defects are identified in the development process, system and user acceptance testing process, and in the production environment. The objective is to minimize the number of bugs that are found in the live environments. To do that, you need to encourage the identification and mitigation of bugs in earlier and earlier stages. This sounds fundamental, but becomes difficult to implement. There are lots of methods that you can do to identify, solve, remove, and prevent bugs. You must have a way to measure that these methods are improving your success rate. And that means measuring the number of defects found in each environment – development, system test, user acceptance test, and production. The easiest set of numbers to get in a corporate environment is production defects. There is always a problem management system or help desk that tracks these kinds of things. But as a software development organization, you need to implement bug tracking throughout the entire lifecycle of your software. You can trend the numbers, and make sure you are finding more bugs before UAT, particularly in development. Tools like Bugzilla, an open source bug tracking tool, can help you track, trend, and manage defects in your software throughout its lifecycle.

Support Ticket Management

Software is not a static entity. It is always changing. Just think of all the patches, updates, service packs, and bug fixes that Microsoft releases on its suite of software. In a corporate environment, it is no different. Software management does not end once it is released. Teams of developers will be constantly updating desktop, web based, and console applications based on new requirements and requests from their clients. Problem Management software can be used to help track and trend all of these requests bydata points such as severity (Urgent, High, Medium, Low), priority (Urgent, High, Medium, Low), assessment (Customer Assistance, Required Modification, Elective Enhancement, Break Fix), difficulty (High, Medium, Low), etc. You can measure success agains more complex metrics such as the number of tickets created, number of open tickets, time to resolution, etc. All of these metrics will help you determine how fluid, stable, usable, sustainable, and maintainable your software is. Do not ignore your software or its users once it is released to production.

Analytics

Web Analytics tools can tell you how many users you have had on your site, how long they visited, where they came from, where they went, how they found your site, did they reach your goal pages, did they convert, and did they return. There are free web based tools like Google Analytics, and over the shelf packages like WebTrends and CoreMetrics that can help you measure site activity. Do not ignore these metrics to help you define current activity, make improvements to your site, track your new results, and continue to improve. They directly measure your clients’ interaction with yoru software, and can identify trends that with simple changes can vastly improve your software and development processes.

Conclusion

So… these are some of the ways that we track the success of our software. There are a host of other methods to measure software, such as function points, lines of code, complexity, interfaces, velocity, etc. What ways do you measure your software? how do you define success? What are your plans for the future?

Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Blogging Trends in the Pharmaceutical Industry

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Blogging is now one of the easiest ways to get a message out to your audience. Readers can read and bookmark a blog and get content when they want it, or subscribe to your posts via an RSS feed and have content pushed to them when it is available. There are lots of free open-source solutions that give you the freedom to create, publish, and maintain your content any way you want. Blogs about the pharmaceutical industry abound; but pharmaceutical companies, with all their legal, regulatory, and FDA compliance concerns, have been apprehensive about embracing this fast paced content.

There are lots of blogs about the Pharmaceutical industry. Pharmalot is a blog by The Star-Ledger’s Ed Silverman that keeps up with pharmaceutical industry news. RXBlog also tries to stay on top of pharma industry news. The Pharma Marketing Blog is an op ed for John Mack, the editor in chief of the Pharma Marketing News e-newsletter. CafePharma is another popular website targeting pharmaceutical sales professionals, and has a blog called Pharmagather, that attempts to centralize pharma blog articles from all over the web. These are all great, but are not blogs from the pharmaceutical industry. Pharma companies need to have their own presence in the blogosphere.

Nutra Pharma, a small biotech company, announced that it was re-launching its corporate blog at the ned of February, 2008. Nutra Pharma’s blog has been around since 2006, but has not gotten much attention. Posts are infrequent, very brief, cover a very narrow scope, is buried within its corporate site, and quite frankly are coming from a small biotech company.

Centocor, a company owned by Johnson & Johnson, is going through lots of transformations, both in its pipeline and in its organizational structure within its parent company. It has launched a blog, CNTO411, in an effort to stay closer to its patients, its partners, and the blogosphere. It was launched just this March, has gotten a lot of press, and is leading the way in pharma blogging.

GlaxoSmithKline has released alliconnect, a blog about its new OTC weight loss drug, alli. They are touting the blog as, “place for you to have a conversation with us about weight loss issues.” It is geared towards the drug, but also at the disease state, and invites its patients to freely comment on the posts.

Johnson & Johnson has also tried to harness the power of blogging. Earlier this month, J&J organized and held an event for blogging mothers called Camp Baby 2008. The event was designed to reach out to bloggers who had complained about J&J and their products in the blogosphere and have a two way dialog. The mothers were flown in free, were fed at the 5-star restaurant “The Frog and the Peach” and were the recipients of lots of swag. Throughout the process, there were lots of bumps and bruises along the way on both sides, as The Star Ledger article describes, but dialog channels were open and J&J claims this as a positive event for all.

The blogosphere offers great benefits to pharma, biopharma, and biotech companies. The only barrier to entry is the aversion to risk. These four companies have taken the risk, and are seeing benefits on all different points of the continuum. But as the adage goes – No Risk, No Reward.

How to Redirect Like A Pro

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If you have ever redesigned, moved, or migrated a web site, then you know how important 301 redirects are. You have worked hard at building up your page rank within all of the search engines. And you don’t want to lose it. Your users have bookmarked your pages, and your partners all have links to your pages. And you don’t want those to break either.

My team and I are currently in the middle of migrating our first major site from one platform to another, and if we are successful there will be many more to come. We need to handle redirects for all the old content, the media pages, the banner advertisements, the existing client side redirects, and the internal analytics tracking pages. Here are some of the resources we are using while managing all the redirects in the site.

Are there other resources you use when dealing with 301 redirects? Do you have any lessons learned about page redirects when redesigning or migrating your site? Leave me some feedback and let me know what you think.

How Strong is Your SEO Kung Fu?

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I am by no means an expert. I work on web sites every day, and work hard at making sure that those sites are optimized from a technical and content perspective. There are a lot of good things I do, but there are a lot of things still left to learn.

It is always a good idea to benchmark your skills against others. These articles on SEO lifecycle are a great way to understand the progression of your skills as an SEO professional. And the quizzes are a great way to compare your knowledge against others in your field. Take these with a grain of salt, however. There is always a slant or twist to throw you off track. And some of these are just for fun.