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Learning a bit about the EPUB format

Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Shopping cart suggestion to buy an EPUB book

Screenshot of the shopping cart letting me know I could buy an EPUB version

I was buying some books on Rosenfeld Media, when the shopping cart suggested I buy Donna Spencer’s Card Sorting and that it was available in the EPUB format for iPhone and Sony Reader.

Although I was intending to buy the physical book, for curiosity I decided to also give the EPUB version a go. A few weeks ago I briefly glanced over an article What Web Designers need to know about EPUB (via Russ Weakley’s Some links for light reading) but hadn’t delved further so I thought it would be a good chance to learn more.

I completed my order, downloaded the EPUB file, and then realised I didn’t know how to view it! (Note: I didn’t mind figuring it out for myself and although Rosenfeld Media don’t currently have instructions for using EPUB files they have let me know that they will be improving the experience of buying EPUB books as they ramp up their EPUB publishing.) A little research and I found a number of applications including Stanza which is available as an iPhone app and a desktop program. Their instructions helped me to transfer the EPUB file from my PC to my iPhone via wifi - in the end a simple process.

Poking around Stanza on my iPhone I found that I could download other books, many offered free by publishers or through lapsed copyright, and some paid books. I realised I had previously used a similar app to download a few books but perhaps I’d stumbled on a poorly built app as I wasn’t too awestruck by the idea of reading on my phone at the time. Stanza’s interface and interactions, while a little clunky, are alright and “Card Sorting” is formatted well for reading on screen while I wait for the physical book to arrive.

I realise that the EPUB format has been around for a number of years but it feels like it’s been one of those ideas floating around waiting for technology to catch up. Sure, the iPhone might not be the ideal reading interface but the Kindle, iPad, and whatever else comes next means that people who might be unable to access good (or any) book shops/are environmentally conscious/want to save some money/want to try before they buy/etc have a much easier method to do so. Australian books are pricey which I presume is due to the distance books have to travel from overseas, or because the shipping orders are small due to our small population, so providing access to quality information in affordable and environmentally friendly ways is a step in a good direction.

I know that I won’t be giving up on my much-loved bookshelves any time soon, but in the same way that digital music downloads of single tracks encourages me to try more artists without spending a lot of money on CDs, I expect I’ll now “try” more books before I buy physical copies.

Now if only the various publishers, hardware developers, software developers, etc could agree on a single format for e-books and sort out the whole DRM mess!

A few links I’ve stumbled on while looking for more EPUB information:

On reflection as I hit “Publish” this begins to feel like an ignorant post, but I actually don’t know anyone who owns a Kindle or an e-reader, and I’ve been very much in love with the physical flipping of book pages since I was a child. From my choice to download an EPUB book and having a good experience with it, I’m now much more willing to give e-books a go.

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Multi-site audience grid design

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Multi-site audience grid

This diagram might not make a great deal of sense without the context of what the sites are about or what the audience types are but I don’t think I’ve seen a diagram showing audiences in this way before so I wanted to share it.

Problem:

In an effort to clarify the requirements for a group of sites, I’ve created this diagram to address an assumed need to completely cater for a large number of audiences on numerous sites and therefore the replication of vast amounts of content on each property.

Solution:

I reviewed the audiences to understand their objectives and discovered there were in fact distinct needs on each site for different audience types. While audiences required detailed information for specific tasks on each site, content overviews would be sufficient for other site sections. I considered that through external links or search engines a person might find themselves on a site with overview, rather than detailed, information about their topic of interest so clear links will be provided so they can fulfil their goals at the site best suited to their task.

This grid allows me to:

  • define a solution to provide content to audiences in the most appropriate setting;
  • clearly see which personas and user journeys to focus on for each individual site as well as the movement between sites;
  • see a simplified content structure for each site;
  • reduce the amount of time spent on content maintenance (minor changes will happen on the primary audience sites only, major changes require a small adjustment across a number of sites + larger changes on the primary audience sites).

Although this example diagram shows 5 primary audiences for a single site, I hope you agree that that’s much more comfortable than 10+!

(The diagram was created using Konigi’s free wireframe stencils for OmniGraffle)

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Recent reads - using data

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

The Birth (And Death) of Market Research: Why Design Research Will Prevail (Sam Ladner)

This article suggests that summary statistics relied on by market research companies are no longer relevant and qualitative research of the long tail is where the money’s at:

  • “Design research uncovers how long-tail niches develop and what differentiates them.”
  • “…design research is about knowing what to build as well as evaluating the prototype.”

When Data Gets Up Close and Personal (Stephen Anderson)

A good contemplative piece about tracking performance and creating feedback cycles. As an example, Stephen has considered how you could make a “game” out of email by considering motivating factors and presentation of progress.

  • “What we’re really talking about is setting up systems whereby individuals can (1) see in a tangible way (2) reflect on, and (3) learn from their past behaviors.”
  • “Get creative with how you represent the data– our brains will thank you for that with extra attention.”

The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures (OkTrends - Christian)

Well… the post is about dating site profile pictures, but I think that it’s a good showcase for data analysis. They’ve done extensive research and they’re using it to give advice to their users = users get more successful results from the site = spreading the word to friends = more money for the business.

The 2 in 100 who might matter most - your core web audience (Seb Chan)

Seb Chan from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum provides an example of how he looks deeper in to the museum’s site traffic data to realise that 2% of people are visiting the site 10 or more times in a quarter.

  • “Whilst we all like the big figures of casual visitors we get to our websites many institutions, having flirted with social media, we are beginning to realise that casual visitors, much like casual visitors through the door of a museum, aren’t so useful for building sustained co-creative relationships with.”
  • “This 2.10% is one that needs a lot more analysis as does the ‘5 or more’ category. How do they arrive at our site? What are they looking for? What do they spend most time looking at?”

Analysis Ninjas: Move Beyond The Top Ten. Find Love (/Insights) (Avinash Kaushik)

  • “You know what is the one thing stopping you from finding truly actionable insights from your web data? Web analytics gems lie deep in the data and we spend our lives looking at the top ten rows of data.”

This article encourages investigation of the long tails in site traffic data to pin-point opportunities and shows how to make sense of what at first might seem like data overload. Avinash provides examples of how to apply advanced table filtering in Google Analytics, generate tag clouds (I’ve given this a try with a client’s search keyword data and it sprouted some very useful visuals), and how to set up keyword trees with Juice Analytics.

Back to Basics: Tip for exporting rows (Google Analytics blog)

This is a brief tutorial to show that while Google Analytics allows you to export up to 500 rows of data normally,   to export more (eg. all your search keyword terms) you can add &limit=xxxx (where xxxx is a number more than the total number of results) to the URL and then download the CSV to retrieve all the data.

Charting the Beatles (Michael Deal)

Beautiful infographics [swoon] !

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Recent reads - form design

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

Last week I was doing some research on form design and jotted down the following links and thoughts:

The Apple store’s checkout form redesign (Luke Wroblewski)

A lengthy article reviewing the old and new Apple store checkout process highlighting the good and bad points.

  • Under “Dynamic Indication” is an explanation of how you can detect the type of credit card people are using based on the first few digits of the card. Minimising the amount of information people enter on a form is good.
  • Under “Primary Action” is an example of helping users move forward through a process by clearly distinguishing the “continue” button from every other item on the page.
  • Under “Error Messaging” is a point about clearly distinguishing which fields have errors and why - Apple’s use of yellow field highlights can be confusing. I disagree with the authors suggestion however to use red alone for error highlighting - a differentiating colour backed up with simple instructions may be sufficient and less likely to make the person feel stupid/at fault.

Marking required vs. optional form fields (Luke Wroblewski)

Suggests showing the word “optional” with the field labels instead of marking mandatory fields with an * is more user-friendly.

23 forms and data entry usability guidelines (User Focus)

A usability checklist when designing and building forms.

In-line tips (an example)

I personally like the treatment on the PlainFrame Early Access form to show tips in-line with a form - hover your mouse over a question/field and you see tips on the right-hand side. It reduces the length of the form and can be easily ignored by people more familiar with the terms they are being presented, or those who don’t wonder why they’re being asked particular questions.

I haven’t checked out how accessible it is, but if it’s not then there would be work-arounds to make it accessible.

PlainFrame In-line tips

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Second-degree conference value* from UX Australia

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Although I didn’t make it to (what sounded like an amazing) UX Australia conference in Canberra the other week, I’ve been learning from the presentations that have been posted so far on Slideshare.

I haven’t looked through all of them but here are a few particular presentations and my notes about points I found useful:

  • Uxau09 More Content Quality B - David More
    Looks at how to develop collaborative/useful information architecture in complex organisation with plenty of stakeholders; and getting non-expert authors to generate content.
  • Emerging a User Experience Strategy - Penny Hagen
    An example about the process in creating a user experience for UNSW.
  • Experience Visions: A Case Study - Fred Randell
    About experience visions and dealing with Telstra, which provides good tips for dealing with large/complex organisations/developments.
  • More, Better, Faster! Agile Design for Fun & Profit - Matt Balara
    A useful overview of agile development. There’s a short case-study from slide 57 onwards about the redevelopment of the ecco shoes web site which visually shows the process.
  • Design For Multiple Touchpoints - Shane Morris
    Has some information about the process behind developing the Lonely Planet Surface, and includes information about how people interact with things they can touch (which can also relate to iphones, mobiles, screens, etc)
  • Ka-chunk! When customer experience design fails and how to avoid it - Joel Flom
    I like the general statements in this presentation, and the diagrams on Slides 21 and 22 showing balance between business, customer and implementation.

* “second-degree conference value” is a quote from UX Australia organiser, Steve Baty, when I referred to how much I was learning without being there.

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Use data effectively

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Once every few months I do a big shop online to order long-lasting and heavy items that are difficult to carry home from the supermarket.  For the past few years I’ve ordered from Coles.

To do my shopping I have to login to my Coles account. That account has tracked all my previous orders, and no doubt Coles knows when I created my account, but for some reason once I’ve logged in Coles still asks “New to shopping online with Coles?” and suggests I take a quick tour.

Coles fail

No, I'm not new to shopping online with Coles.

A minor addition of logic to determine how many times a user has completed a purchase on the site could hide this “feature” from seasoned users and instead provide access to it from a less prominent place inside the site for those who might still fancy a tour some day.

Helpful features are nice, but intelligent features are great.

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