garry’s posthaven

If you click around the radio buttons above, the form resets. Orbitz does an AJAX call to reset the form with new HTML. I can select two cities, select my dates... and I just decide to click "Flight + Hotel", Orbitz blows away my form submissions (data loss!)  and replaces it with a blank form! Not only is this rude to the user, it's bad for business. 

This simple UX gaffe could be worth double digit percentage decrease in revenue for Orbitz over the course of a year. For a company that made over $700 MM, that's could easily be over 9 figures. 

This could be solved with an incredibly simple and tiny amount of javascript to remember selected airports and leave/return dates. It could be fixed in less than an hour by a halfways decent hacker.

It's things like this that make me thankful for Hipmunk.

Taskrabbit is a cool service that helps people list local tasks that they'd like to hire people to do. It's also a great example of behavioral design-- helping users not just complete the task but want to do it as well. 

Here's the new task UI:

1) Great copy is great communication

Copy is UI, UI is copy. The only way you can explain what's happening on the screen is by the text and elements on the screen. They work together. You must explain what's going on, and what's next. Yes, you know what's happening, but you're the creator of the UI. Users have no such context.

Remember that as a designer, you must design with intention in mind, but evaluate what you create with beginner's eyes. Often in YC office hours, PG will point out glaring holes in people's designs -- but it is because he has honed this skill of viewing a web page with the eyes of a novice, even if you've been talking about the idea with him for hours.

Clear your mind, read what you've got, and if it doesn't make sense, then explain. Rinse, repeat.

2) Great use of contrast to determine what's important and what's more information 

You'll notice the darkest pieces of information (highest contrast) are the headers for the specific inputs. "Title of your Task" for instance. It's big, it's dark, and it commands the most initial attention. This establishes a visual hierarchy. All things below that title pertain to that particular input. There's proper padding between inputs so that the grouping is further reinforced. 

Some products mistake extreme brevity for being simple. Wrong. You should strive to have enough text to properly guide the user to their task. A long block of text that is undifferentiated won't be read, of course -- so your main tool here is to make the important stuff bolder, larger, and command more attention. Then write additional text in a smaller, lower contrast font.

If they care, they'll read it. If they don't, they won't. And that's just OK. The important part is that people complete the task. 

3) Show a lot of examples

It's the worst when UI doesn't show an example at all. It's the rudest experience. Imagine a brusque waiter, or a bank clerk who can't be bothered to help you with what you're trying to do. That's what you're doing when you don't show more examples. 

Yes, that even means helping people with writing titles.Notice how Taskrabbit drops a greyed-out tip right there in the textbox.

DO THIS. There's nothing that will orient a user more as to what they should put than text right there inside the textbox they're about to fill out. Don't forget to clear it when the textbox gets focus, though.

4) Progressive Disclosure

See those little links at the bottom? They're optional. And they don't take more space than they need. If someone wants it, they'll click. If someone doesn't want it, they won't. 

This is virtually your only tool to create things that are both powerful and simple. Use it everywhere and you too will be both easy to use and powerful. 

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Remember, UI is a conversation that you have with your users, hundreds if not thousands of times a day. But if you can make that conversation go well... it'll be a few million times a day soon enough. 

Again, props to Sarah Harrison, @sourjayne, Taskrabbit Director of UX. I am impressed. Two thumbs up, way up.

Like this article? PS, you can follow me on twitter here.

Noticed this on my minifeed recently: 

94 items from Twitter? This may well be an unintentional consequence of rolling up message updates per Facebook Application. Lord knows there are a lot of apps out there like Farmville that produce an incredible amount of noise. The natural way to limit the impact of other apps on the overall Facebook experience is to collapse these.

But at the same time, it is quite a profound way to greatly limit the effectiveness of other apps on the platform. 

Facebook is well within its rights to do this. It certainly isn't new, too. It is advantageous behavior. Facebook activity is regarded as premium and gets more attention. As Twitter consolidates power and cuts out third parties from the attention stream by telling people not to create twitter clients anymore, it makes total sense that Facebook incentivize use of its own authoring tools. 

Anytime attention is pooled together, there's value. Like water in a desert, creators of apps of all kinds will seek that attention anywhere it can get it. Whether it is after a Google Search or on a habitual reload of a StumbleUpon page, cmd-tab to Twitter App or dopamine-seeking Facebook visit.

It is a profound metaphor. As app creators, we seek this attention, and to pool it, to divert it, and to control it... Attention, like water, as life-giver. Attention, like water, as enabler. Attention allows us to create our cities and charge rent on the whole thing. 

It so happens that some of the nicest cities to spend time in are created out of the public good (Craigslist and Wikipedia), while others are twisted up corporatocracies (examples left as an exercise for the reader). 

Finally, a sharing UI that makes sense. Previously, when using Google Apps for our posterous-inc.com company domain, we would *routinely* have problems where people wouldn't be able to see documents without a link because the item was 'shared with everyone' and everyone had 'access' but it didn't show up in their document list. There was a disconnect between whether it was 'in your list' and 'accessible.' Thankfully, these unnatural modes (modes are the enemy of understanding) have been removed.

The Google Apps team has nailed it by making the visibility options top-of-mind. They did this by flattening the option of 'in your list' vs 'accessible' into one set of choices.

They've also added visibility options prominently to the top bar. This is a good move that makes it a lot easier for people to immediately know what level of privacy they've chosen.

Note also how it contextually changes and becomes more useful depending on which setting is chosen. At a glance, this turns out to be incredibly valuable.

This is an example of really well done and well-thought-out UI. Kudos.

Lala.com is a music sharing site that's been around for maybe a year or so. They've built some great traffic and have a product I use every day now. I first heard about it actually from Posterous users who kept asking for the ability to embed Lala.com in their blog posts. It's US-only for now (sorry, International friends) but at least now I don't have to pine away for a re-activation of my Spotify account.

As a product, it's great. But there is always room for improvement. Here are a few basic design changes that I think could give a big ROI.

1) Incentivize long-lasting value by switching the Play and the Add to Queue button

When I first saw lala.com, I thought it was yet another in a line of many music services. I, like every new visitor to every site, had my mouse hovering over the back button. Luckily I stayed around long enough to discover its value. They have pretty great song libraries that have everything from hits to the obscure parts of the catalog. And they allow you to play the whole song through once for free, which is very impressive.

They've expertly engineered the site to be playable at all times even during browsing. This means you can actually just browse around the site without ever stopping your music player. (It's something that our friends at YC-backed thesixtyone.com do really well too.) But the main call to action on most songs and albums isn't to take advantage of this ability to create playlists.

Instead, it's a play button that causes it to play now. Many users may not even realize they can queue long playlists of songs. Instead, a 'queue' button is next to it, but as all designers realize with time -- if it's a secondary action, nobody uses it.

The fix: Make the queue button default, and show a tooltip or flyout that teaches the user that they've added something to their playlist. Heck, make an ongoing sidebar to the right to reinforce the playlist concept. A single song play may only last 3 minutes, but if you can get people to create playlists of music, then you've a) achieved incredible lock-in and b) proven that you're valuable. You've beaten the back button, at that point.

When you're new, focus on being as simple as possible. But when you're in a crowded space, you have to focus on showing the user how you are different and better. Lala is interesting because of a voluminous on-demand catalog of music that can be your new music player playlist. So focus on that.

2) Once you prove to them you're valuable, make it easy for the user pay you and buy into the system.

Lala has a concept of song credits, and when you sign up, you get a prominent item in the menubar that lists how many song credits you have. You can listen to any song in their system for free once, but if you want to play the full length song again, it costs 10 cents to 'buy the web song' and stream the full length song forever. Like Spotify, without the monthly fee.

I didn't need all 25 song credits to realize this was a valuable service. Yet clicking on Song Credits always shows the same text wizard above. It wasn't until I used up all 25 credits that I was shown the UI I was expecting:

It's OK and even desirable to have great explanatory text around how your site works-- but don't hide functionality that is the critical path to the user who wants to buy into your system.

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Building user experiences is just a repeating conversation you have with thousands of users every day. A faux pas here or there will not necessarily doom you, but it costs you some percentage of future customers in the end. For a service that hopes to be viral and organic, a few percentage points in conversion can result in significant deviations in outcome and success. A first impression is make or break, whether in person or on the web. Make yours count.

You should follow me on twitter here.

Dustin has been cooking up something fierce at his blogazine dustincurtis.com. His latest work is an article about how forceful language can more than double the number of conversions you can get on a given call to action.

Like asking people to follow you on twitter. You should read the full article here.

You should follow me on twitter here.