At the end of last year, I contributed to a year-end roundup piece in A List Apart called “What I Learned About the Web in 2011.” I shared the most impactful lesson I had learned from various user research projects last year.

CONTEXT IS KING
The most important thing that 2011 taught me about web design is that physical context of use can no longer be assumed by platform, only intentional context can. For the past couple of years, we have gotten into the habit of presuming that mobile means on-the-go, desktop denotes a desk, and tablet is on the toilet. But increasingly the lines are blurring on where devices are being used and how they’re being used in unison. This year I have learned to see devices as location agnostic and instead associate them with purpose—I want to check (mobile), I want to manage (desktop), I want to immerse (tablet). This shift away from objective context toward subjective context will reshape the way we design experiences across and between devices, to better support user goals and ultimately mimic analog tools woven into our physical spaces.

When I had blogged about my reflections, Jim Nielsen commented that my thoughts had spurred him to create a graphic to represent my idea. I love it so much that I wanted to reblog it here.

Paul Boag also read my thoughts in ALA and wrote about his reaction in a post titled, “Device implies use not context.” In his case he’s using “context” to denote physical context, whereas I differentiated between physical context (location) and intentional context (intention of use). While he likes the notion of tying device to intent, he isn’t entirely sure he agrees with the intentions that I apply to each device.

What do you think of how I’m using device choice as an indication of intention and not location? Do you feel that my division of check/immerse/manage is a fair one?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts as I dig into this concept more deeply.

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It’s quite overdue, but this blog is now optimized to be viewed in a mobile browser. Many thanks to Ben Seven for giving me the kick in the ass I needed to get it done:

Commented on You’re not a user experience designer if… by Ben Seven:

Are you allowed to call yourself a User Experience designer if you don’t care about the user experience of your own blog on handheld devices? I tried reading this article on the bus home having seen it retweeted, and enjoyed the delicious irony of it not being particularly web friendly. Just saying – UX suffers from the same thing my profession does – people calling themselves designers with no real expertise, qualification or questioning from clients – but it’s strange to be concerned about the experience of computer interaction and not catch up with the boom in mobile web browsing on your own platform!

I confess to having a case of “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.” I think some of the busiest practitioners have the crappiest websites because we’re so busy fixing other people’s problems. But it’s no excuse. I need to do a major website redesign pronto.

But hey, now you can at least read this on mobile! Please leave a comment if you are right now.

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For anyone who’s ever been to Manhattan, or perhaps even heard of Manhattan, chances are you know that our roads are based on a grid — Streets are east-west and are numbered, Avenues are north-south and are numbered or named.

62nd Street and 2nd Avenue
106th Street and Park Avenue
1st Street and 1st Avenue

You get the picture. It’s easy to learn, and directions are never needed. It’s probably the most famous grid plan in history.

Then you go to the West Village. Shit’s crazy over there.

It’s roads were paved and named in the mid-18th century, long before the New York State Legislature’s Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 went into effect. The entire neighborhood has a grid that’s offset about 50 degrees from the rest of the island.

West of 6th Avenue, 4th Street and Bleecker Street swing north and essentially become avenues. That’s how it’s possible to find yourself at the intersection of W 13th St and W 4th St. But it’s certainly a usability problem. Even the natives get confused (including me), walking in circles, consulting their smartphones.

But it’s redesign is, shall we say, out of scope.

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…or a Kindle, or a nook.

I recently spotted this man at a Starbucks in SoHo.

He was clearly settled in for the day, his keyboard propped up against the wall behind him, feet kicked up, book in hand…and in the other hand, a magnifying glass to help him read the damn thing.

That very same day, I wrote my first blog post from my brand new iPad (the day I discovered the new frappuccinos). As I was writing it, pinching the screen to zoom into a webpage, I was reminded of the Zoom functionality in iBooks (represented by none else than a magnifying glass), that allows the user to instantly increase the font size of the book’s text without altering the design or layout of the book itself.

Seeing this man, I felt an urge to start doing user research, as though I were a designer of some e-Reader, aiming to identify his needs, uncover his pain points. But I let him be — surely he loves the feel of the pages between his fingers, and a magnifying glass will never run out of batteries or lose its signal. I think he’s just fine the way he is.

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I received the most curious email this morning. At first I thought it was spam, but after reading through it I think it’s a legitimate question for me and may be based on my previous post on Helvetica. I’m not sure what to make of it so I’m posting it here. Leave your thoughts in the comments and I’ll be sure to share them with the email’s author, G F Mueden.

From: G F Mueden [email address redacted]
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 08:55:34 -0700
To: whitney@whitneyhess.com
Subject: Legibility — Grading, Testing, and Standards

Ms. Hess, this is much too long for email, and I beg your tolerance. Please be so kind to read to the end

My eyes are at the margin, the minimum commercial standard, as defined by the newspapers. If they can’t read them, they don’t buy them. I read them with difficulty and only in very good light. A year or so ago I was so put out by annual reports created more as monuments to the designer’s ego than to helping express the message. They were glitzy and harder to read than the workaday stuff in the proxy statement. I have found nobody testing or grading and only two standards. There is one for labels on aircraft wiring and one for material that State sends to the President

Without a way of grading printed samples I have no way of saying what percent of an audience is offended (lost?) by hard to read copy. I have been saving small samples of printed material with the object of building a catalog of them, graded for legibility. The professionals who study legibility seem to be in university psychology departments and they study it it a minute level, experimental, and are not producing something that I can use to get McGraw-Hill to make its publications easier to read. [They are'nt all bad, but some, e.g., tables in Outlook are faint and Business Week's choice of fonts and backgrounds offend frequently.]

I have emailed Lighthouse Internationl and have been given scholarly reasons why I should give up. It is as if I was trying to rain on their parade, a “not invented here” rejection of an idea. I met with their legibility guru, Dr. Aries Arditi, on Friday. He said that we can’t measure legibility, it is too complicated, we don’t have the instruments. After a while he admitted that he had been a judge in a legibility congtest and it had all been done by eyball. This is not a six sigma problem. My feeling is that any standard, even imperfect and subject to challenge, will be better than none. I want a way to say, e.g., this sample can be read by only 85% of the population. The pros jump on me and ask what do you mean by population. I refuse to go beyond everybody in the US who wants to read and has the smarts to do it, even though their eyes are not up to it.
At Lighthouse you are nobdy unless you have a doctorate.

I need to know more about the distribution of near-vision acuity in the population and can find no good numbers. I would like to tie legibility to the clinicians standards. E.g., where on your eye chart (there are many others than his) does the newspaper stand? I asked Dr Bruce Rosenthal who heads the Lighthouse Low-vision Clinic to comment on te significance of each line on his chart and got no response.

Dr August Colenbrander (with an organization out West (K…-…?) offered two useful comments.
One was that my greatest difficlty will be with well sughted people. They don’t understand what low-vision people see. “I can see it, why can’t you?” The other was that there actually is a minimum standard, the newspaper. He has developed a near nision chart that takes contrast into account. He was the only one to ask about me and why I was asking.

You may be able to use this: I have found it easier to let my eyes rest in a small space on the screen and scroll the headlies to my eyes than to search the page of an imitation “paper paper”
for the headlines in order to decide what to read. The NYTimes emails me the headlines with a short paragraph for each, I scroll though them (one column with ads on the right) and love it. Not perfect because they pick only what they consider the top story. I would like to see what it would be like to have the whole paper delivered that way. It is like the old story that ends with “You tell that dog to come around to where my eyes is restin’”.

I have found no place where the legibility of printed material is the principal subject I have gone so far as to buy the right to use “legibility” as a domain name, but have not wanted to go to the cost in money and frustration of setting up a website.

Enough. Comments welcome.

G F Mueden [number and email address redacted] ===gm===

So what do you think?

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