Experiencing Information

Optimal Usability, a usability consulting company in New Zealand, has a beta version of their new card sort program called Optimal Sort.

On the surface of things it looks to be quite good. I only tried out the online demo so far–the participant’s view of a sorting exercise–and it was very smooth. It’s Flash based with drag-and-drop interaction. Easy to move items around and label boxes and stuff like that.

Once the screen started getting full, however, some of the categories were cut off towards the bottom (on my computer at 1024×768), and it became difficult to move items in and out of those boxes. Otherwise, it’s simple enough for any participant to get the hang of in a matter of seconds. Both open and closed sorts are possible.

In general, one of the advantages of card sort programs is that they can help with analysis. Yet, most of the programs available overcomplicate results with dendograms and clustering and not-so intuitive statistical formats. Though I didn’t see the results from Optimal Sort in the demo, it looks to be cleaner and more straight forward from the screenshots and descriptions.

I particularly liked this claim on their site: “use common sense and experience to spot patterns.” Imagine that: you have to use your intuition as a designer to interpret the results.

The process of administering tests seems to be easy as well. In a SurveyMonkey-like fashion, you can send a link out to participants, and they can then complete the sort on the web. Of course, this leaves out what I consider an important part of card sorts: talking to people about why they grouped things together and observing where they have difficulty grouping things. But the ease of getting people to take part and efficiency this tool offers makes it valuable.

Sam Ng from Optimal Usability tipped me off to this. Thanks, Sam.

They’re still offering free sign registration with the beta version until August. Check it out.

Todd Wilkens has an interesting post over at the Adaptive Path blog entitled Why usability is the path to failure. The ensuing discussion in the comments is just as good.

I must say that I agree with Todd’s take on usability. Sure, it’s important but it’s really a baseline for any functional design. Since everyone ultimately wants to be usable, there’s nothing usability people aren’t doing or saying that competitors aren’t either. It’s not a differentiator.
It kinda reminds me of Michael Porter’s take on corporate strategy. He essentially says that operational effeciency is important, but not strategic. It’s operational. It’s something everyone strives for, even your competitors. Can’t find the full text of Michael Porter’s “What is Strategy?” article free online, so here’s the summary and order form for the article on HBR.

“Michael Porter argues that operational effectiveness, although necessary to superior performance, is not sufficient, because its techniques are easy to imitate. In contrast, the essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in systems of activities that are much more difficult to match.”

We’ve had SharePoint at work for over a year now. I’ve heard nothing but complaints from colleagues about how to use it. Sure, it might solve technical problems and allow for some flexibility, but the usability of the system stinks.

I’ve had an unusual thing happen while using it: seems the more I use it, the worse I get at it. I feel I’ve actually un-learned how to use it. Is there such thing as a negative learning curve? If so, Microsoft has figured out how to do it.

I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion about how bad it is, particularly the navigation. I’m constantly searching for the right link to click, and often am lead to click the wrong thing. Curiously, most of things you see about SharePoint on the web are about how to implement it, how to customize the CSS, and so forth.

One problem is that it tries to be like Office applications, but it’s web based. Navigating for desktop apps and websites isn’t the same thing. So there seems to be a collision of approaches in SharePoint. Maybe it’s just me, but SharePoint is embarrassingly bad.