User Centered

After posting this article on Legacy Locker, CNN reporter Mallory Simon contacted to follow up on my likes & concerns with the service. You can read more in the article...

New Services Promise Life After Death

Eddie Lopez is the kind of tech-savvy guy for which a service such as Legacy Locker was made. The St. Paul, Minnesota, man has three online banking accounts, a PayPal account, domain names, Web-hosting accounts, multiple e-mail addresses and many social-networking accounts.

"I do think this is something people should be really considering these days," Lopez told CNN when asked about services such as Legacy Locker. He wants to hire a service to handle his digital assets but is concerned about privacy.

"Although I'm glad there's people breaking ground in this area, I don't think I would jump at the first opportunity to sign up," Lopez said. "My concerns are turning over such an exhaustive list of user names and passwords to a single business. That's one-stop shopping for any hacker to get access to just about every detail of my life."

Lopez would prefer to entrust half of his digital-security information to a service such as Legacy Locker and the other half to family members, so that each side's information would be useless without the other's.

"I hope Legacy Locker and similar services can address these privacy-security concerns with some real-world solutions," he said. "I just don't feel comfortable turning over my digital life -- built over 15 years -- to a kind promise."

A report by 37signals on their redesign of the signup chart for their Highrise product.

PS: Since yesterday, the more appropriate "Pay as you go | No hidden fees | No surprises" line was replaced on the live site by the redundant "Our customers" quotes.

The most recent Minnesota UPA chapter presentation on usability considerations for GPS rekindled my interest GPS products.

Inspired by suggestions & reviews recommending the Garmin nüvi devices, I checked the company website to see what they had to offer.


Of the 31 devices on the page, 24 all look pretty much the same, with no other useful information other than the product name. There's very little useful information from just the picture. I can tell for example, that the 600 series appears to be widescreen, but the 250W is also wide, how would I know to get a 200 series over a 300 series?

This became an arduous process of selecting items to compare... arduous since I can only view 5 at a time, so my first comparison was 200 vs. 300 vs. 600. vs. StreetPilot just to find out what is the difference* of the product lines are.

I was overwhelmed with my choices. I liked that I was able to really dig into the specs down to the level of making my purchase based on if I planned to use my phone to connect to it via bluetooth, but frustrated and confused that there was too much going on. This is the Paradox of Choice... I left Garmin's site and relied on other sources to choose and purchase my product (newegg.com btw).

But then I realized that this is by design; there is a caveat to throw in. The goal of the page linked to would be to get as much information out there about the products as possible. In the Paradox of Choice, there's a story about jelly varieties... when people were allowed to sample items (oddly enough, I believe it's 24 kinds, the same number of relatively similar looking GPS units on the page), they sample quite a few varieties, but purchased a small percentage. When given a choice of only six jellies, they purchased more often. So the idea is that you offer tons of choice if you want to "get the word out" about your product. But you should limit choice when you want users to take action, or make a purchase. Since that's not necessarily the goal of the Garmin site, it makes sense to consider this approach.

Still, there's design considerations that would have rounded out this user experience saving me time, confusion, and frustration. Break the automotive section up, group the series of GPS devices with a couple of marketing words about what target audience each 200,300,600 series device is meant for and provide at least one or two bullets for each product that sets it apart from the rest of the series "Bluetooth connectivity" or "MSN traffic info."

For what it's worth, I settled on a model a few years old now, but it still does everything I'd want to do at a considerable savings... the nüvi 350. I've been wanting to study the UIs of GPS devices for some time now, hopefully some stories will follow in the near future.

* You might be able to determine differences from the large, rotating images on the "On the Road" page, but I never saw it since I clicked on the "Products" link on the top/global navigation and then "Automotive":

Here's an interesting idea (I need to get out to you all today*) to help streamline banking from USAA. First off, USAA is a bank that caters to military and military veterans and their families. Given the "roaming" nature of the members, the bank has very few actual branches and handles most of their transactions via mail or the internet- which means they usually do a great job at both.

As a customer, I've managed to do the vast majority of my banking online with ease (and always with Opera), but the one bottleneck that I haven't been able to avoid was trying to deposit a check. That has always been done by mailing it in....until now! USAA recently introduced a feature called Deposit@Home which allows you to sign your check at home, scan both sides and have it immediately available.

Great idea- kudos to USAA for recognizing the problems and bottlenecks in the user experience and focusing on fixing them. The only question I have is... who still has a scanner? I haven't used one since I scanned all my baby photographs back in '97 (I was the last child of 4, so there wasn't that many)

*Needed to get this out today since I start a new job on Monday...working for a bank (as a usability analyst). Yes, that's partly why my posts have slowed down (in addition to a move), but why haven't *you* been posting?!?!

Duplication of effort, one web form that could easily provide the functionality of the other, poor and confusing wording, optional elements, and a help file that could be a little more helpful. All these and more with FedEx.coms shipment tracker application.

...either that or I'm grossly missing something. If I am, then pretend this post is about how the FedEx.com tracker doesn't send a clear message to its users...

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