I wrote an article recapping the Philadelphia World Usability Day event that took place in November.

Read it in the UPA Voice.

Well, 2006 has come and gone and my blog is still a sorry excuse for a traffic generator, but we’ve had some fun. I noticed Jeff Veen had a “favorite posts of ‘06″ post, so I thought I’d steal the idea here.

My 2005 series on Evite remained popular, especially with the addition of a review of Mark Hurst’s Goovite. I even got an email from Mark saying that he liked the post and was implementing two of my ideas: from address as the sender, and allowing commenters to choose whether to share their comments.

I expanded my reach a bit this year, posting articles on both Digital Web (Preparing for Widescreen), and UPA Voice (Remote Usability Tools).

I started a feature called Topic of the Week as a way to drive traffic and commenters, but it didn’t really work. Still, these are some of my favorite posts, particularly “Do Blogs Still Matter?“, Emotional Design and Automatic Audio.

Lastly, I declared September 12, 2006 to be a landmark day in HCI history. Will I be right?

In honor of the great Festivus holiday, today I choose to air some of my UX related grievances. In the infamous words of Frank Costanza, “I’ve got a lot of problems with you people!” Feel free to post your own grievances below.

To mog.com, for having the worst search engine ever. Searching for “roger clyne and the peacemakers”? That brings up nothing. But “roger clyne & the peacemakers” — we’ve got a match! (Just “peacemakers” brings up nothing too, btw, so we’re clear.) Cool site otherwise, though.

To Lotus Notes, for “finding” (Ctrl + F) messages off the viewable area of the screen, so I have to exit out of the “Find” dialog and scroll down to see if the message found is the one I’m looking for, and if it is not (usually the case), having to re-enter the dialog and start over. (I could have an entire list on Notes, but that’s enough for now.)

To the Chester County Library System, my library, for requiring “www” in front of their url, www.ccls.org. Typing http://ccls.org only times out. University of Richmond (richmond.edu) and Colgate University (colgate.edu) are two additional culprits (out of many, many more).

To MySpace, for putting my password in plain text in my account confirmation email. I just registered guys — I remember my password. Please don’t send it to me through one of the least secure channels on the entire internet!

To everyone who has a MySpace page that plays music when I visit it. Aside from a specific band’s page, I can’t recall ever enjoying the song that plays. Why must thou force it on me?

To every retail site that doesn’t remember that I like to “view all”. It is so simple to remember this — why make me click the damn link again and again???

To the new Yahoo! Mail, for — despite being the very best webmail — not having an advanced search feature, so everytime a person is copied on an email, that email appears in the search results. I’ve got 4,000 emails people, I need some additional search functionality! While we’re at it, why does it jump to the very top of the list when I sort by Name or Subject? How about jumping to the selected email? Even Lotus Notes can do that.

To Firefox’s developer toolbar, for only having “800×600″ as an option for browser resizing. Clearly developed by someone working at 1024×768, who didn’t think about those of us who develop at higher resolutions and want to test 1024 as well. Yes, I know that I can type it in manually, but that isn’t very convenient, is it?

To Comcast’s DVR, for not being TiVo. I like that you record HDTV and integrate into my channel guide, but after that it is all downhill.

To my DVD player, for not having a shuffle option when playing MP3 CDs. How am I supposed to celebrate Festivus without good music?

What problems do you have? Comment below.

Gucci takes a bold step at capturing the emotion and feeling of the in-store experience on their website. Instead of providing search and navigation like most eCom sites, Gucci instead uses flash to display handbags on shelves as one might see in the store; the user can scroll horizontally (but not vertically) to browse through the entire selection.

Pros:

Gucci is a high-end luxury brand and this site establishes them as such. By displaying the product in this light, the designers are able to bring some of the emotion that one might get from shopping the store online.

Product details appear within the interface, sliding out and making it very easy for customers to view the details of several products without a pogosticking effect.

Cons:
The horizontal scroll is not typical of websites, and as such may not be clear to some users. (although the arrows and the overall design do afford that there is something more to the left of the viewable area).

This design idea clearly will only work for some companies and products; those with a deeper product line or less high-end product would never be able to pull this off.

Nike recently launched a new, revolutionary commerce site that is built entirely in Macromedia Flash.

I’ve always been critical of Flash sites — although it is a powerful tool, it is typically used poorly and in a way that compromises the usability of the site. Nike, however, in partnership with design firm R/GA, has achieved a level of usability never reached previously using flash. Briefly put, the site is phenomenal.

Pros:

Guided navigation and refinement tools that are both slick and well thought out — Flash allows for an incredibly smooth, easy user interface, but the design also relies on web navigation standards to make it incredibly easy to learn.

Very cool “lightbox” animation to load product detail, almost like Gap’s “QuickLook” but with the entire product detail.

The browser BACK button works with both product detail and navigation! One of my biggest complaints with Flash has always been that it deactivates the inherent browser tools (and such the tools that users are familiar with) — R/GA has coded the pages so this is not an issue.

Shopping cart works similar to Gap’s, making itself known enough to give good feedback, but not taking the user away from the path they are currently on.

“Single-page checkout” allows users to get through the entire checkout interface without reloading the page; repeat users can checkout with lightning speed. Nike has already seen an increase in checkout conversion from their previous incarnation.

Although one might think that designing a site entirely in Flash would greatly compromise natural search optimization, Nike has built a skeleton site specifially for spiders to crawl and as such is better poised for natural search than they were before. (I’d hope they can leverage this for reader accessibility as well — espeically in light of the Target lawsuit — but I can’t say for sure that this is the case.)

Cons:

Can be slow to load, even on a fast connection. (It should be noted that users without Flash can still browse the old site; Nike reports that around 7% of all traffic still uses the non-Flash site.)

The zoom feature can be a bit strange at first, as the product description and selection fields appear over top of the enlarged product. I think that this will become less befuddling after repeated use, but I was thrown the first time I saw it.

The dropdown menus can be a bit skittish; moving my cursor around the page (especially in the masthead) seemed to send menus flying in every direction. Perhaps putting a split-second delay on the menu would help prevent it loading when the cursor simply passes over it.

It took about 4 weeks for sales to return to the level they were before the launch. Although this implementation was clearly ripe for an “all at once” launch, with all we have learned it is a shame that a company still needs to take that big of a hit when launching new functionality.