Performance is huge. We think of it as a feature. Speed is the best feature your product can have.

Last year Google introduced these performance enhancements to Picasa to make flipping through photos faster, and the usage more than doubled. When a site gets twice as fast, it often gets more than twice as much usage.

—Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager

When it comes to enterprise software, these stop being the same person. This is why enterprise software is so bad.

Making software predictable and consistent makes it much easier to use. This session will explain UI consistency and point out examples of failures and their consequences. We’ll discuss when it’s appropriate to break consistency, and how to build tools and process to ensure applications are consistent with human interface guidelines and real-world practices.

Moderator: Paul Schreiber Screen Real Estate Agent, Apple
Jennifer Fraser Lead User Experience Designer, Corel
Alex Graveley Senior Engineer, VMware
Steve Johnson Senior User Experience Mgr, Adobe

Before you even get started, you see an example of the little details Apple pays attention to, but Microsoft is too lazy to care about. Insert the disc in to your drive.

• The Mac OS X Snow Leopard disc is named “Mac OS X Install DVD.”
• The Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) disc is named “GRMCULXFRER_EN_DVD.”

GRMWhat?

Here’s how I described it:

An unknown error occurred. Call your system administrator. Abort/retry/fail? Bad errors are everywhere. Sure, complain on twitter. But how do we fix them? Through hilarious examples, we’ll explore the 12 ways errors fail us. Then, we’ll teach you to write lucid messages that won’t make you (or your users) cringe.

Please vote for my panel:

• Range hood bulb: 10 Watt G4
• In-oven bulb: 50 Watt 130 Volt GY6.35

Head to your corner store and pick one up. Now, on with the story.

Recently, some of my oven’s light bulbs burnt out. I’d replaced the bulbs in the range hood before. They were easy to find—standard G4 halogen bulbs. They come in 10W and 20W varieties. I picked the 10W, since I wanted to be safe. It worked, and was bright enough.

But replacing the bulbs inside the oven was a different story, and a lesson in the idiocy of GE.

None of the bulbs in the store matched the in-oven bulb exactly. And at $11 a bulb, I didn’t want to be wrong. So, I headed home to get my facts straight.

First, I checked the manual for the oven. It showed me where the bulbs were, but listed neither a part number nor specifications.

Problem #1: The documentation is useless.

Next, I tried GE’s web site. I went to parts and accessories.

Problem #2: you can search for parts by part number or appliance model number, but not by keyword. There’s no way to search for “light bulb.”

What’s the model number of my oven? I don’t know, and it’s not on the manual, nor is it marked on the oven itself. I even check GE’s list of suggested locations. Nothing. Next, I try and browse for the model. I head to the home page, then to products, then gas cooking (a terrible URL), then slide-in ranges (I don’t think I have a free-standing range) then to stainless (an even worse URL). I look at all the pictures closely. None of them are my oven.

Problem #3 It’s too hard to find your model number.

Problem #4 GE’s site doesn’t show information for older/discontinued models.

Working on the assumption that all of these use the same bulb, I picked the first model on the list: PGS975SEMSS.

Aside: Who names this crap? That’s an even worse name than Sony’s Vaio VGN-CS290JEC (or perhaps The Apple Internet Server Solution for the World Wide Web).

Problem #5 Model numbers are incomprehensible.

I head back to the home page, enter PGS975SEMSS as the model number and click Go. Do I see details? No. I see a list of four model numbers, none of which are the one I entered. I pick first one on the list.

Now, I have three choices: browse by category, search by keyword or enter part number. Since none of the categories seem to work (BODY PARTS?), I enter “bulb” and click go.

Sorry! The part or keyword you searched for could not be located on the model you selected. Please try again.

Seriously?

Body parts it is. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Here we go:
LAMP HALOGEN 257 WB08T10021

The 257? That’s the item number in this exploded view.

Problem #6 Search is broken.

Problem #7 It took me eleven pages to find the part I want (Home, Parts & Accessories, [detour: home, products, gas cooking, free-standing], model number search, model number results page, part search, part results error, part search, body parts).

They still won’t tell me what kind of bulb this is. And they want $10.50 + 5.95 shipping = $16.45. That’s one expensive light bulb.

Problem #8 Bulbs are bloody expensive.

Fortunately, I have better luck with Google. Part number in hand, I see several sellers. None of them are too appealing. Part Advantage wants only $7 for the bulb, but $8 for ground shipping. Part Store has almost identical pricing (I’ll save 8¢). Appliance Parts Solutions has me down to $4.42 + $6.50.

I score with eBay. Only $4.20 a bulb and $5.40 shipping. I order four — two for now, and two spares, since I don’t want to go through this again.

The bulbs arrive, and they work. And, for the record, GE ovens use 50 Watt 130 Volt GY6.35 bulbs.

GE, this is why your conversion rate sucks.

The Gap web site was clearly not designed by anyone who actually wanted to shop. It might have been designed by people who wanted to sell things, but that doesn’t help me.

So what’s wrong?

• Store hours are not listed. Anywhere! (I tried calling the Burlingame store, hoping to get voicemail, but instead got nothing.)
• Search is almost useless. I can search for jeans in my size, but I can’t restrict the search to items in a price range or search by colour.
• You cannot tell which Gap stores have which items in stock.
• The store locator is broken. When you search for stores in “San Francisco,” you get this error:
  

  We couldn’t find your exact address. Please choose a location from the list below or try another address.

  1. San Francisco, California
  United States
  Use this address

  2. San Francisco (county), California
  United States
  Use this address

  Next, you can search for all Gap-affiliated stores. You can also search for specific subbrands (GapKids, babyGap, GapBody, GapMaternity, GapOutlet). What you can’t do is search for Gap stores only, excluding the subbrands.

• Why isn’t “in-store pickup ($0)” one of the shipping options? It works really well for REI.
• Why are some sizes out of stock? I can understand that individual stores can’t stock every size-item-colour combination, but the web site (warehouse) has no excuse. If something isn’t in, at least let me order the backordered item.

People, if you want my money, don’t make it hard for me to give it to you.

Over at Yahoo, it seems some people just don’t know where they are:

Fuzz, on the other hand, has a sense of humour, gently prods its users to fill out their profiles:

No more addition mistakes. Enter checks one at a time, and let the ATM do the math. So smart! Why didn’t anyone think of that before?

Wells Fargo does this now, too — they scan the checks and read the amount in automatically. And they no longer require envelopes.

PC Financial’s relatively low-tech solution is something that can work with all existing ATMs, and doesn’t require new hardware or banking laws.

On the other hand, take a look at the work of a clueless Canada Post graphic designer:

Canada post’s ship-in-a-click, part 2

No wonder Canada Post is so slow at delivering things — all their mice are upside down.

In particular, we will propose that the efforts of people in this room ensure that technology development efforts better incorporate the

1. functional,
2. economic and
3. social/culture

realities of prospective users. In my case the “users” are rural Africans, in your case they may be different, however I think the same focus and principles apply.

1. Understanding the user’s cultural/social context

Let’s take the example of an improved brick press, a technology we were working with with a partner in Zambia.

This technology produces a compressed earth and cement brick that is as good as a cinder block yet as uses 1/16th the cement and so is much cheaper. Our partners were trying to determine why more units aren’t selling, as there are innumerable walls for which this compresses earth brick would be perfect. It turns out that users and engineers have a different definition of wall. To an engineer it is a structure preventing people getting from A to B – in which case the new, cheaper brick is much better. To Zambians, it turns out that a wall is a status symbol; having a concrete wall brings more prestige than any other type of wall. As a result, homeowners aren’t interested in this brick maker.