Understanding user behaviour through user research is an integral part of our design process. In the last ubuntu.com website testing, some insights surfaced about user behaviour, which could help to shape a great user experience for our website. We share the three mains ones here. They have been much discussed in the UX, and the findings from the testing reinforced their importance.

Who were the participants?

12 participants took part in this research. They belonged to two different groups:

• Ubuntu novices: those who have limited computer knowledge and had not heard of or used Ubuntu before. 8 participants were from this group. They were professionally recruited and of mixed genders.
• Ubuntu users: those who use Ubuntu OS on a daily basis. They were from our Ubuntu users database pool and were recruited via emails.

What were the three main types of user behaviour found?

The Power of Images

“I go straight to the pictures before I go to the words. You look at pictures and they give you a flavour of what it is all about.”(P3)

” I use images to decide on a product. I tend to work very visually. Sometimes it is not easy to understand the jargon, and it is much easier to see what it is like. ” (P6)

“I’m just looking at the picture to see how much learning is required.” (P10)

In the testing process, we observed that participants appeared to rely on images heavily to help them form an opinion about Ubuntu. They used images in multiple ways throughout their interaction process, including:

• To understand what the interface is about or make sense of an unfamiliar concept/feature
• To decide whether or not it looks easy to use
• To compare it with what they are currently using, and to see how much learning it may require

Images are therefore a powerful communication medium for us to build a positive brand with our users.

Take away:

It is important that images are relevant to their context and offer the best presentation of the product. We should use images to reflect the user friendliness and uniqueness of Ubuntu.

The Journey of Persuasion

“When I first came to your site, you need to tell me why I want to use this. This is paramount.” (P2)

“ It (the site) needs to highlight what I don’t know. Why I should use it, and with examples.” (P5)

When participants first landed on the homepage, they expressed their need to be informed about what Ubuntu does, who it is for, and why they should use it. They wanted to be convinced from the very start.

During the exploration process, when they were looking at Ubuntu pages, participants were attentive to the apparent benefits Ubuntu could offer to satisfy their personal needs. They relied on concrete examples and statistical figures to establish and enhance their understanding and trust. They also enjoyed browsing through different quotations from our users.

Take away:
The persuasion process should start from the moment users land on our homepage, until leaving the site. The key proposition messages should be specific, apparent and repeated throughout the user journey.

Make Use of Opportune Moments

“It says free upgrade for life, that’s good. Built in security, that’s good. Thousands of apps, that’s good too. I want to click on these to find out more.” (P3)

Our website has many good design features that grabbed participants’ attention straight away, for instance, the image tiles for ‘Reasons to love Ubuntu’ and the use of bullet points to outline essential information about Ubuntu’s main features. When participants encounter such design features or content that they found interesting, they often wanted to click an icon or topic to explore it further. They were disappointed or even frustrated if these were not clickable.

Take away:
We should make use of these opportune moments to keep users engaged and informed by providing efficient and desirable navigational paths to lead them to more detailed and relevant information.

What’s next ?

The web team has been carrying out changes in response to the user testing results. The aforementioned user behaviour findings will feed into the next web design cycle to help with the design decisions. This will help users to get even more out of their visits to Ubuntu.com.

A few weeks ago we introduced key screens for our core utility app designs, and we’ve been sketching key journeys ever since to unpack these concepts further.

We use key screens to communicate the overall, high level concept of an app, outlining key journeys is a design technique that gives us a feel for how users can accomplish a typical task when using the app.

Key screens

The main purpose of the calculator app is to enable calculations for simple day to day tasks; “rituals”; such as splitting the bill at a restaurant or working out your budget for groceries.

There were a lot of questions about the visual design of our concepts so far, so this week we thought we’d try sharing our key journeys in a different style of wireframe. Here is a closer look at the calculator app.

Enter a new calculation

There has been some interesting discussion on the mailing list about how to handle the order of operations (or ‘operation precedence’). The driver for this simple view is to support basic calculations. The order of operations will be handled as it normally is – with multiplication and division first, followed by addition and subtraction, without brackets ( ).

E.g., 1 + 2 x 4, will be read as 2 multiplied by 4, add 1, equals 9.

• A ‘0’ is displayed on start to indicate no calculation
• User enters ‘1’, a different colour (e.g., orange) is used to indicate the last input
• User enters ‘+’ and ‘2’, operators are displayed after a number input
• User enters ‘equals’ on the calculator numpad, and a dash separator line appears with the calculated answer and a line to indicate this calculation could be pulled up to create a new one.

Start a new calculation

We have also been brainstorming ways to create a new calculation. Our concept was originally inspired by the idea of a receipt tape, which we wanted to follow closely, and an idea that came through the mailing list was that of ‘ripping-off’ a calculation by pulling up; creating a new one (awesome idea, Bruno Girin, thanks!).

• User pulls up to create a new calculation, geo-location, date and time of the calculation will be added to the top of the calculation automatically (e.g., ‘@Tesco, 06/03/13, 10am)
• The previous calculation has moved to the top, remaining only as a visual hint.

View a calculation

• The calculations are seen as a continuous list, user can scroll up and down the list freely
• As user starts to scroll down to view previous calculations, the calculator numpad transitions out. The numpad transitions back into view when user scrolls up and reaches a threshold of the last calculation
• An interesting note is that the QWERTY keyboard could appear at any time by tapping to edit labels. (This will be explained in the ‘Adding a label’ journey; keep reading).

Delete a calculation

• To clear a calculation user swipes side way and a label (e.g, ‘clear’) transitions in
• If the cleared calculation is at the bottom of the list, a ‘0’ is displayed. If the cleared calculation is followed by another calculation, then that calculation will be displayed.

Add a label

We have included the ability to add titles and labels to the calculations to help us when we’re splitting bills or doing our grocery calculations!

• As mentioned above, geo-location, date and time of a calculation will be added automatically when a new calculation is created
• User taps to the left of a calculation to start creating and editing labels!

Numpad layout

Also, there’s been a lot of discussion about the layout of the numpad! Based on our key journeys, here’s what we’re thinking to cover daily use scenarios:

As usual, sign up to the Ubuntu Phone mailing list and the IRC channel to discuss more.

We’ve been making great progress from both design and development on our four core utilities for Ubuntu on phones so, while we are iterating these concepts, we thought this was a good time to share more of the inspiration behind the apps designs. This helps us keep our goals in sight, not only on the design side but throughout development.

A day in the life

It’s morning. An alarm sounds. I turn over. I look at the clock. It’s going to be a busy day. I get out of bed.

I shower. I finish showering. I wonder what I should wear. I wonder what I will I do at the weekend. I check the weather.

It’s lunch time. We go to a restaurant. We pay. We work out the bill.

It’s evening. I check my todo list. I check my calendar. I’ve got a date. I send a message.

It’s night. I check the weather. I check my calendar. I check the time.

(Photo credits: heredfordcat, roberstinnett, Jacob Bijani and  Phoenix Dark-Knight)

Sound familiar?

Without something to support these daily routines we think we’d be lost entirely, and we don’t think we’re alone in that!

The opportunity

The opportunity with the Clock, Weather, Calculator and Calendar apps on the Ubuntu phone is to create a consistent experience which impacts the daily lives of our users. A suite of apps that are used as part of a daily ritual; sophisticated, consistent and content focussed.

Let’s call them Ubuntu’s rituals

An alarm sounds. I turn over. I look at the clock.

The Clock app

• The same clock face for every feature; adjust with easy gestures.
• Something to delight; it’s the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see at night.

I wonder what I should wear.

The Weather app

• Check the weather today and yesterday, tomorrow and the weekend.
• Make it contextual; do I need my umbrella? (terribly British example!)

We work out the bill.

The Calculator app

• Tear off the strip of calculations and jot down your notes.
• It’s all about the task; this app helps you work out your budgets and bills, not the definition of Pi!

I check my todo list. I check my calendar.

The Calendar app

• Organise your life your way by month, week or daily diary.
• Again, it’s about the task and the context; use the calendar app as a todo list, a diary, a planner, a journal, a life log; and the calendar will behave how you need it to.

What does this mean?

When we design and build an app, we always have a key story in mind. Whenever we think “oh it’d be really cool if…” we remind ourselves of this story; therefore it helps us to produce an app that is simple, streamlined and delightful to use.

“Ubuntu rituals” inspired the concept of these four apps and we will use this to guide us through further iterations of both design and development.

So where can I see this?

Follow our development progress on Google+ as well as the usual places; the Ubuntu Phone mailing list and IRC channel.

In my last post, I spoke about my transition from academia to industry. One thing that I felt I would miss were the opportunities to speak to students, and watch their progression throughout the year. So when I was asked to go back to the University to give a talk, I jumped at the chance.

So I prepared what I was going to talk about and set off to the School of Computing at the University of Dundee to meet these talented students. My first job was to help assess their group pressure projects which they had been tasked with the week before. The theme was educational games. Over the next 2 hours, I sat and was amazed by what the groups had produced in such a short period of time.

The Winning Group with their Ubuntu prizes

Several things frustrated me however.

Each group had 3 minutes to present their game and explain what they did. But they all focussed on showing gameplay and illustrated some of the code that they used. A number of groups stood up and highlighted that they felt their game wasn’t very good because they didn’t have strong coders in their team. When I asked them questions about the processes that they had been through before coding, they all showed evidence of brainstorming, wireframing and design. My biggest issue however was that most of the groups started coding before they considered who the user would be, and therefore, they considered a user to meet the code, rather than producing the code for a specific user.

So this lead me to change what I wanted to talk to them about, and I did an interactive session with the 80 odd students to develop a user profile for the remit they had been given. We looked at who the user group was, what were the characteristics of this user, where would they want to play the game, why they would want to play the game and how they would play the game. We brainstormed on a whiteboard and agreed on which attributes to keep, and which to remove. This was all done in half and hour. The students really took on board the importance of considering the user, and how quickly it could be done for the projects that they would be presented with going forward in their education.

It was the most enjoyable lecture that I had ever taken, and I look forward to doing it again soon.

On another note, later that evening I made my triumphant return to the land of stand up comedy. I was invited back to do Bright Club Dundee having performed last year. It was great fun to do, even though I don’t think I’ll be looking at a change in career anytime soon! Below is a photo of the performers….you can quite clearly see the fear in our eyes!

Bright Club Dundee Performers

If you want to see my set (which contains strong language and little humour) then follow this link.

Last week we organized a local Ubuntu conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which we plan on making it a regional conference from now on thanks to the help from our friends in the Uruguay LoCo. The conference was great but by far what stayed with me was a talk and some subsequent conversations with Guillermo Espertino about how a new-ish and small group of designers that used open source software to design professionally had gotten together and started a community called Gráfica Libre. These guys, individually do some very amazing things. As a group they've blown my mind 

These are designers who are using 100% no-excuses free software on a daily basis to design and ship professional designs to customers.

These are some of the things they've designed as a group for the conference:

The video was edited by Guillermo Espertino and the 3D animation done by Martin Eschoyez. The blender source files are available on his website.

This was done by Lucas Romero

There's a presentation given by Guillermo Espertino (you can see the work his company does with open source in their website http://ohweb.com.ar/) you can download it (it is in spanish, though) and it highlights the challenges they've faced so far in putting together designs in the open and collaboratively. They still feel they have a few iterations to go until they have a settled process, but it certainly does look like they've cracked the hardest part to me.

In the last few months, I've been lucky enough to be able to hire some exceptional people that were contributing to Ubuntu One in their free time. Every time someone comes in from the community, filled with excitement about being able to work on their pet project full time my job gets that much better.
So, everyone say hello to James Tait and Micha? Karnicki!

Now we're looking for a new team member to help us make the Ubuntu One website awesome. Someone who knows CSS and HTML inside out, cares deeply about doing things the best way possible and is passionate about their work.

If you're interested or know anyone who may, the job posting is up on Canonical's website.

I have to confess, after I heard I found out we where shipping Unity in Ubuntu by default I was nervous. I got asked many times what my feelings were, and I think I generally dodged the question. This was a pretty risky move, which we are still a few months away from finding out how well the risk pays off.
Given that a lot of the design behind Unity wasn't done in the open and hadn't had a long time to mature, I've been sceptical of whether we  (as in, the Ubuntu project) could pull of such a massive change in a such a short period of time, and still have happy users.

I've been using Unity on and off on my netbook (which is my secondary computer), but while enjoying a long weekend I've spent the last few days using it a lot, and my feeling towards the it have changed quite a bit.

I think it was the right decision. Overall, it feels like an overall improved experience, even with its current rough edges. Exactly what I think we need to win over a wider audience and have them fall in love with Ubuntu head over heels. Everything is starting to feel much more tightly integrated and with a purpose, as well as some eye-candy sprinkled in a lot of the right places.
I'm really glad Canonical decided to invest to heavily in such a risky and insanely complicated task, Natty is probably one of the most exciting releases I can remember.

There are still a few key challenges ahead, most notably to me is making the design process more open and inclusive, but still being able to deliver something that feels polished and not a pile of consensus between people who have gotten good at arguing. The Ayatana community does seem to be slowly growing, though, so the future looks pretty bright. Getting the right balance between Canonical and a community around design feels like one of the hardest problems to solve, luckily, Canonical continues to hire the brightest and most enthusiastic minds around, so I'm sure it will eventually feel like a solved problem.

I think it's been almost 6 years since I landed in the Ubuntu world, I've done all kinds of things in the community ranging from starting and building the Argentine LoCo to editing the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, to evaluating new Ubuntu members in the Americas region. With its ups and down, great press and wild controversies, it still feels like the best place to be.

For the first year and a half in Canonical I worked with the amazing Launchpad team, with the ambitious goal of building a new user interface, introducing AJAX in an established code base and rolling it all out on time. While all of that was overwhelming in itself, what was more important to me was making sure the UI remained consistent across time.
Long story short, it was a success and it's been 8 months since I've left the team and the established process is still on-going.

I wrote a paper on the whole experience and presented it at the agile conference XP2010 in Norway.

Here's the introduction:

When I started working with the Launchpad team I was tasked with designing and rolling out a new interface using cutting-edge technology on a well established product and team. The existing processes and team structure made it very hard to roll out big changes while also ensuring consistency as time went by.
While the general designs and work ow changes were being eshed out, I started to drive some change to the existing processes, enabling me to be successful at an objective that would take a year to accomplish, and unexpectedly, beyond that.
The project was 4 years old and had over 500 dynamic pages with different templates and layouts that had been left untouched at different points in time. The goal for the next year was to make the application easier to use, even enjoyable. I also had to make the UI consistent across the board, take the project from static HTML pages into the wonderful world of in-line editing, streamlined work-flows and predictable interactions. In parallel, fundamental features that had been developed were going completely unused and we needed to turn that around. A re-usable AJAX infrastructure had to be developed from the ground up, new features needed to be designed and delivered, and general navigation issues needed to be addressed.
However, this story isn't about the success of the roll out of a new interface, but rather the success in the process changes that evolved during that year and how the project went from nobody feeling ownership over the user interface, to the developers taking strong ownership.

I feel very passionate about this subject, and hope this experience can help other projects and teams.

Here's the paper for download: xp2010_paper.pdf

After a year and a half in the User Experience team at Canonical, I’ve decided to move to the Ubuntu One team. It’s been an amazing experience to be part of that team but I’ve been missing doing development on a regular basis a lot lately, so I’ve decided to move into a role where I can get my hands dirty more often.

I will start by taking on anything on the web interface together with an amazing team, we will deliver a great experience and a higher level of polish for Lucid. There are some exciting new features coming to Ubuntu One, so it’s a great time to be part of the team, especially with John Lenton and Elliot Murphy as managers.

This does mean I will be moving away from the work I’ve been doing on Launchpad which makes me sad, it’s a fantastic and ambitious project filled with the smartest and most passionate engineers I’ve known.

If in the next few months you don’t start feeling like life is getting better for you on the Ubuntu One web UI, please come and find me and point me and hold me up to my promise of wonderful webby things.

Following up on our survey on icons in Launchpad, Charline Poirier provides us with the outcome:

Edit :  High level of understanding, but a strong association with “attention”, “warning”, and “danger”.  Might be worth modifying colour or shape to distance the icon from that interpretation.

Merge :  Reasonable understanding of “merge”.  However, participants were not entirely sure if the icon referred to the state ‘merged’ or the branches themselves.

Remove :  Icon strongly associated with “do not enter” and “delete”.  The interpretation “remove” comes only in third place.  The icon is strongly evocative and might be better used to designate a more consequential or prohibitive action.

Remote bug :  A reasonable percentage of  respondents understood the “remote bug” icon.  Many, however, did not.  It appears that the key for interpreting this icon is the representation of the bug itself.  Various potential states of a bug were suggested as interpretations.  This icon could be made more explicit.

External link :  Relatively well understood.  It is worth noting that the icon has powerful suggestion of globality and reach (associated with translation, languages, internationalization, etc).   It is a very evocative icon that could be more fully exploited perhaps in another context.

What next?  We’ll attempt to create new versions of the icons, run another session of user-testing, and if understanding improves, Launchpad gets new icons  \0/

Following up on my last post about user testing icons, it has been incredibly successful!  We’ve had over 100 responses, and are now going through the data to put together a summary. I will post information on our findings as soon as we finish the work.

In the mean time, Charline Poirier, who is in charge of user testing in our team, has created another survey with 5 more icons to help us get more data. If everyone could give this survey another spin, and create some networking effects to help spread the survey to non-Launchpad users, it would be tremendously helpful to us. Here’s the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=6iwthaIT4FwPCsMPa1EDEA_3d_3d

We’re trying to improve the icons we have in Launchpad so they’re more usable across different cultures and types of users, and our first step is to do some user testing on our current icons.

The Canonical User Experience team has set up a survey to gather information on how users see our icons, so if you have a few spare minutes (it’s very quick!), please take the survey and pass it on to other people, especially if they don’t use Launchpad, as they will be less biased.

Survey is available at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=8hXmjrmFS7TmQCjh7jJB_2bQ_3d_3d

Check out what happened when AJAX bug tags editing landed in April:

Note that since Launchpad has the edge/production split, so the changes in the graphs are less drastic since a set of users start interacting with new code before others.

About a month ago, I went to Canonical’s office in London for a sprint, and made good use of my Sunday by visiting the National Gallery. One fantastic thing about London, is the fact that all museums are free, not just because otherwise a few years back I couldn’t of afforded going, but because the fact that they are free gives you the freedom of going to the same ones over and over again, and just calmly visit the bits you’re interested in.

As I was walking by, I saw a painting that really struck me. It was a terrible and dark dragon eating two men, one of them is in agony while it’s face is being eaten off. Quite shocking:

After looking at it for a little while, I went closer to read the description of it, which unexpectedly shocked me ten times as much:

“This gruesome episode comes from the story of Cadmus which is told in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (III: 1-151). Cadmus was sent by the Delphic oracle to follow a cow and build a town where it sank from exhaustion. The cow stopped on the future site of Thebes, and Cadmus, intending to sacrifice it, sent his followers to get water from the neighbouring well of Ares. They were killed by the guardian of the well, a dragon who was the son of Ares. Cadmus then killed the dragon and on the advice of Athena sowed its teeth in the ground, from which sprang up armed men who slew each other, with the exception of five who became the ancestors of the Thebans.”

This got me thinking on how much first impressions are important in the user experience, but really hit me how much more important the actual content is. We tend to relay the content creation and management to “the marketing folks”, when I feel it’s a crucial part that should be worked on together to balance off the amount of text, with the tone in which it’s written, and to ensure that we’re adding value to the users’ experience.

Yes, I’m starting to see UI everywhere.

When you present yourself on the web, you have 15 seconds to make an impression, so aspiring champions of the web 2.0 industry have converged on a good recipe for success:

1. Make your site visually appealing,
2. Do something different and do it very, very well,
3. Call users to action and give them an immediate, rewarding experience.

We need the same urgency, immediacy and elegance as part of the free software desktop experience, and that’s is an area where Canonical will, I hope, make a significant contribution. We are hiring designers, user experience champions and interaction design visionaries and challenging them to lead not only Canonical’s distinctive projects but also to participate in GNOME, KDE and other upstream efforts to improve FLOSS usability.

Fortunately, we won’t be working in a vacuum. This is an idea that is already being widely explored. It’s great to see that communities like GNOME and KDE have embraced user experience as a powerful driver of evolution in their platforms. Partly because of the web-2.0 phenomenon and the iPhone, there’s a widely held desire to see FLOSS leap forward in usability and design. We want to participate and help drive that forward.

There’s also recognition for the scale of the challenge that faces us. When I laid out the goal of “delivering a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years” at OSCON, I had many questions afterwards about how on earth we could achieve that. “Everyone scratches their own itch, how can you possibly make the UI consistent?” was a common theme. And it’s true – the free software desktop is often patchy and inconsistent. But I see the lack of consistency as both a weakness (GNOME, OpenOffice and Firefox all have different UI toolkits, and it’s very difficult to make them seamless) and as a strength – people are free to innovate, and the results are world-leading. Our challenge is to get the best of both of those worlds.

I don’t have answers to all of those questions. I do, however, have a deep belief in the power of the free software process to solve seemingly intractable problems, especially in the long tail. If we articulate a comprehensive design ethic, a next-generation HIG, we can harness the wisdom of crowds to find corner cases and inconsistencies across a much broader portfolio of applications than one person or company could do alone. That’s why it’s so important to me that Canonical’s design and user experience team also participate in upstream projects across the board.

In Ubuntu we have in general considered upstream to be “our ROCK”, by which we mean that we want upstream to be happy with the way we express their ideas and their work. More than happy – we want upstream to be delighted! We focus most of our effort on integration. Our competitors turn that into “Canonical doesn’t contribute” but it’s more accurate to say we measure our contribution in the effectiveness with which we get the latest stable work of upstream, with security maintenance, to the widest possible audience for testing and love. To my mind, that’s a huge contribution.

Increasingly, though, Canonical is in a position to drive real change in the software that is part of Ubuntu. If we just showed up with pictures and prototypes and asked people to shape their projects differently, I can’t imagine that being well received! So we are also hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality. Those teams will publish their Bzr branches in Launchpad and of course submit their work upstream, and participate in upstream sprints and events. Some of the folks we have hired into those positions are familiar contributors in the FLOSS world, others will be developers with relevant technical expertise from other industries.

One strong meme we want to preserve is the idea that Ubuntu, the platform team, is still primarily focused on integration and distribution. We will keep that team and the upstream work distinct to minimise the conflict of interest inherent in choosing the patches and the changes and the applications that actually ship each six months as part of an Ubuntu release.

Of course, there’s a risk to participation, because you can’t easily participate without expressing opinions, visions, desires, goals, and those can clash with other participants. It’s hard to drive change, even when people agree that change is needed. I hope we can find ways to explore and experiment with new ideas without blocking on consensus across diverse and distributed teams. We have to play to our strengths, which include the ability to diverge for experimental purposes to see what really works before we commit everyone to a course of action. It will be a challenge, but I think it’s achievable.

All of this has me tapdancing to work in the mornings, because we’re sketching out really interesting ideas for user interaction in Launchpad and in the desktop. The team has come together very nicely, and I’m thoroughly enjoying the processes, brainstorming and prototyping. I can’t wait to see those ideas landing in production!