Horrific menu information architecture

Microsoft (again) demonstrating how, despite their best efforts (and pots of money), they still can't get it right when it comes to usability. This time, Entourage for Mac is the culprit. Look at the picture and see if you can spot the problem:

The main 'windows' for entourage are: Mail, Address book, Calendar, Notes, Tasks and Project center.

If you close any of these windows (which is the main window), you might think going to the window menu would be the appropriate place to re-open it?

But no!

Under the window menu you can bring up the progress information and the my day panel (which incidentally doesn't behave like a window). None of the main windows are accessible via the window menu.

Instead, to access these windows, you have to access the calendar menu! In other words, if I want to view my mail, I have to select calendar > mail. Mail view is found under calendar!!? Umm? Same goes for address book, notes and tasks.

Next time I go shopping perhaps I'll look for fruit in the personal hygiene section.

If I had the option of not using Entourage then I wouldn't mind. But, since Microsoft's use of proprietary standards has locked me into exchange, Entourage is mandatory.

Basic rule of happy customers: if you force your customers to use your product, make sure it's a good one. Or your customers will end up writing blog posts like this.

OK update: this goes from bad to worse.

The menu changes depending on what you were last doing, even after you shut all the windows. If you've been using calendar, then the menu is called calendar (under which you find mail, address book etc...). But, if you go into mail, then the menu changes its name to view. So either this is a bad bug, or some highly warped interaction design.

The problem here with changing menu names based on your task, is once your task is over and you close the window (going back to the 'neutral state'), the menu names retain their previous state. That and bad menu naming to start with (all windows should be accessible under the menu 'window') .

iPhone apps

The current crop of iPhone apps I'm tinkering with:

Filemagnet is a fast way to transfer files to your iPhone; by dragging and dropping over a shared wifi network.

Meebo is a pretty capable web-based MSN instant messenger client.

Instapaper is my favourite bookmarlet app.

How to be a campaign site IA in 3 easy steps

It's not an easy thing: information architecture for a conceptually and creatively lead online campaign site. Despite being one of the more common species of sites, the online campaign stubbornly resists taming and will quickly revert to it's native state (a 10 mb initial file size and no discernible navigation) if left to it's own devices.

Even the most intrepid information architecture will usually try to avoid these stubborn critters. However, sometimes, through no fault of your own, you may find yourself required to wrestle with one. If that is so (and you have my respect in advance), I recommend you follow the 3 golden rules of campaign site IA. Follow these, and all shall be well. Get the team to actually do these, and you deserve a medal:

1. Skip intro button is mandatory. This is tricky since to a designer, what this dreaded button actually means is bypass all my creativity and work.
   
2. Link to the product page. If the campaign is there to promote a product, link to it! And make the link visible! (6 point type in the footer does not count).
   
3. Toggle audio button.
   

And one last thing... don't forget the metrics

The Symbian Foundation

Very interesting move by the numerous folks behind Symbian, with the creation of the Symbian Foundation.

Everyone (principally Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens, DoCoMo) has decided to sell their shares to Nokia. In turn, Nokia will open source the operating system. 

Given the growing mind-share of iPhone and Android with mobile application developers (despite Android's delays), something like this was needed. Symbian, despite its current market share, lacks the coherence of the other two platforms, requiring developers to put in more effort. And more importantly, it lacks the server-side smarts that will really create business value in the mid term. This move gives Symbian a fighting chance, at least, and that has to be a good thing.

One downside I see though... the only company on the list that really has to see this work is Nokia. The rest have or are putting out Windows Mobile devices as well as Symbian (and some are even using Linux). The result: they're backing several horses so they can afford to have one fall. Nokia needs to be careful, it may find that it's new open source allies turn out to be fair-weather friends only.

Additionally, Symbian will need to come up with some server-side service architecture to match Android (with all of Google's services to fall back on) and iPhone (with the app store, and their ingenious 'push notification' service).

How to marry a millionaire

Toxic attitude coming out of 20th Century Fox, a comment from the producers of the upcoming remake of How to Marry a Millionaire, with Nicole Kidman:

"The original Millionaire was about a girl who was, frankly, kind of fat," the producers explained. "Nicole is thin and perfect".

Disturbing and sad. Go Fox.

Great piece of information design

Everyone and their second cousin (twice removed) are talking about electorate demographics at the moment. The NY Times cooked up this tidy little graphic that visualizes this better than I've seen yet...

Much too much has been made of individual slices... "Hillary is doing well with middle-income non-college graduates with three+ kids and SUVs". To focus on an individual 'slice' like this is to miss the wood for the trees. It's similar to the mindset we get into when we over-think the 'page-level' in site design and miss the user flow. By animating the demographics, as the NY times has done, you get a feel for the overall shape of the electorate: much more illuminating than any slice.

PS: not such a fan of the embedded video player? Click here for a quicktime movie instead

Disinformation architecture

It's not often I see such a good example of information architecture being used to obscure information that a business only reluctantly provides. In this case it's the nutritional information for sandwiches from the fast-food restaurant Quiznos.

Here is the main navigation. Note the lack of a direct link to nutritional information (arguably one of the main reasons users might visit the site, and hence a clear candidate for a main navigation link). So you click on 'menu' to get the sandwiches...


You are presented with a list of subs. The ingredients are listed, but no nutritional information.

But wait! What's that lurking at the bottom of the page? It's a green link saying 'Show nutritional information'. Nice place to hide the link:


If you click this link, it doesn't show nutritional information. Rather it adds a 'nutritional information' link below each sandwich:


Clicking on the Tuna Melt link pulls up a pop-up layer. Initially you see the total calories of 500, with 33g of fat. Not too bad. Until you realize that you're only looking at the small sandwich, and without cheese or dressing. Curious. Given the small vertical space this layer takes up one wonders why all 3 sandwich sizes aren't initially shown.



If you click 'large' then the information for the small sandwiches disappears, and is replaced by the information for large:


But there is still one more step. You have to click the '+cheese' and '+dressing' checkboxes to get the full count. Two additions that no doubt you'll be offered (encouraged?) to add in the store.


Finally you get the complete count. And when you see the numbers it's no surprise they wanted to hide it. The single sub weighs in at 2090 calories; about the recommended daily amount for a typical adult. In one sandwich (Tuna too). And the 175g of fat is double the recommended maximum. That's one serious sandwich.

If governments are providing regulations on label design for food products to protect consumers (surprisingly lax in the US, which seems to prioritize quantity over clarity), then how long is it before rules are in place for similar information online. And what form should those rules take?

Either way, I'd love to read the design brief the IA who created this tortured use case had to work to.

Sadly this practice is much more common than it should be. For example, I personally have once been asked to make the customer support phone number hard to find on a web site in order to encourage users to use the online support tools. The wireframe ended up having the phone number shown BIG at the top of the page, but then the best way to get me to do something is to ask me to do the opposite.