The City in the Clouds music from Empire Strikes Back. One of my favorite parts of the entire soundtrack. It’s haunting. It’s beautiful like the clouds of Bespin itself.

I had the Empire Strikes Back Lunchbox btw. The one with that picture on it.

*sigh*

Anyway…. The music and the geeky question of the day. Listen to it closely. Is there disharmony going on in the music itself? Different keys of music being played? The Horns intentionally in a different key? It’s brilliant I think. It creates a haunting and eerie yet beautiful theme for Cloud City but sets up the discord to follow.

How much of John Williams music on the soundtracks is so brilliantly subtle to help swing the mood of the story in the Star Wars films, and is this another example of why the Empire Strikes Back is obviously the high point of the series?

I love subtle things like this that I don’t really notice or think about for a solid thirty years and then I notice it and realize THAT is good stuff. It’s the sutble stuff that makes things good. The subtle harmonies, or disharmonies in a soundtrack. The edgings of a roof of an apartment building.

That’s what makes something go from meh to amazing whether it’s in music, or movies, or usability design. The subtle touches. The little lines. The little engravings. The little shadows. The little harmonies.

It’s the little things.

Anyway, this was the little thing I noticed today, and I thought it was pretty neat.

Ok, I’m irritated at bad Forgot Password functionality. People still seem to do it in a variety of ways and when it’s not pretty standard, I just get angry.

Here’s what it should be:

The forgot password link should be near the login form, and be obvious, and say ‘Forgot Password?’ or something similar and obvious. Don’t get too cutsy. I like cutsy but when people forget their password it’ll just piss em off.

Then on the Forgot Password page, offer preferably one choice along the lines of restoring the password by entering your account’s email address. If they have an account on your site they need an email address. If they dont’ have an email address….Well jeez seriously? Then they’re not a regular internet user. Make sure you capture an email address on signup, and allow them to log in to your site via their email. Whehter you let them set up a separate username is up to you.

Anyway…just have a box for their email, and a submit button and then if that is an email in your database say “ok your reset information has been emailed to you” and if not then tell them to try again or that the email wasn’t in the system.

That way they need to control the email address as well, not just know it or get it from a keylogger.

Then the email should send a link to reset the password. It should have a one time encrypted key that gets put in the database for the user. That link then takes you to a page, looks at the key, compares it to the user table, and then loads in the resetting password information and wipes the one time key from the database. That way the link to that user can only be used once, from that email.

then just offer them a new and confirm password field, and have them submit.

I prefer then for the system to auto log the user in, but if you don’t want to do that then send them back to the login screen automatically (don’t make them click to it) and have them relog in.

But seriously, why not auto log them in at that point, they obviously want to get into your website.

That’s it.

I honestly hate sites that make you put in the name of your first car, or your favorite color, or your first pet, etc, in order to get your password. I get security questions, I really do, but is there really a lack of security to send people email? Do any regular internet users not have an email when they sign up for your site?

I guess it happens, I’ve seen it happen in certain places, but it’s so easy to get a free email these days, that maybe the person signing up who doesn’t have an email, needs to call you instead, or doesn’t need to sign up. I don’t know. It’s like someone saying “hey mail me that book I ordered, but I don’t have an address.”

Anyway…I think that if you need to handle people not having emails, then you obviously need to do something different than the above, but if you get everyone’s emails then you should just use those to do the forgot password, and make it quick and simple with no security questions, and no mothers maiden name, etc.

Maybe if you’re a bank you can add in extra layers of security, but otherwise…

Also don’t get me started on why my World of Warcraft account is more secure than my bank account… Hey Citizens Bank? Can I get a keyfob authenticator please?

I think it’s a valid question at this point. I remember the first stuff being sold online which seems like an eternity ago, but was only about 15 years. Maybe to some people that IS an eternity. It seems both so short a time, but so far away.

Actually I don’t want to write about that but seriously… Fifteen years ago I was an oddball because I had a computer and even odder because I had a modem. I remember when I went to Grad School in the fall of ’96 I had a laptop I brought with me for notes and people looked at me like I was a space alien. Most people hadn’t heard of the internet, and those that had thought it was spelled AOL.

Anyway I digress. Shopping carts. They’ve been around that long, and it seems on some websites they haven’t improved at all since those early heady days. There seem to be three types of Shopping Carts on the internet. The good, the bad, and the lazy.

The lazy ones are the ones like they were coded 10-15 years ago. I came across one of these just a couple days ago, and it spurred this blog post. I was purchasing season tickets to the Pitt Panther’s this fall, and the form was just godawful. The shopping experience itself was poor, and the shopping cart. Well it was just lazy. One big long form with every piece of information on it. Oh it wasn’t the worst lazy one i’ve seen. I’m sure you’ve come across them. You purchase something and there IS no shopping cart it’s just straight into purchase, and then it’s one form, and you fill it out and hit submit and the purchase is made, and they barely confirm it to you and you worry for a week that you got ripped off before the item hopefully arrives. Those. Lazy.

I guess you could call them Bad too, but I consider them more Lazy. It’s just not taking any time to learn what improves a process. The goal is to increase usability, but the reason is to increase sales, improve customer retention, and lower cart abandonment. Those are the three goals of all this. If you don’t care about any of that stuff, why are you selling anything at all?

Second. The bad. People who have put way too much personal thought into their shopping cart process without talking to users at all. You’ve probably seen these as well. Usually there is a big registration process to get you ‘involved’ in some way, and then there might even be complicated drag and drop processes to make your shopping cart all funky and cool, and things moving and confusing, and you don’t even know what you’re doing anymore. Those are bad. They’re not simply just refusing to learn what makes a site good, they’re changing what was, to something THEY think is good, without even thinking about the users. That’s worse to me than just being lazy.

Again, the goal here is to increase sales, improve retention, lower abandonment. Not show how cool your website is.

Ok so what simple things can be done, and proven to work by usability studies, to improve those three aspects of your shopping cart.

1) Before you even get into the cart offer some basic functionality on your site. Product searching is a must. Users expect this now. If they want a Terry Bradshaw signed football, then they should be able to search for one. Secondly Related items. Every item on your site should have related items, hopefully hand picked by you. If they like the Terry Bradshaw signed football, they might like his signed jersey to go along with it.

2) Call to action buttons. They need to be clear and obvious. Add to cart. Add to wishlist. View shopping cart. Proceed to Checkout etc. If it’s not blatantly obvious to a user how to add an item to his shopping cart, or to start the process to give you money you’re failing. This is surprisingly common.

Ok once they’ve picked up their two items into the shopping cart and clicked the very obvious ‘proceed to checkout’ button  what do we do….

3) Let them buy without registering. Don’t make them log in or register for your site. Don’t force them to respond to an email, or give you any kind of information. They want to buy. you let them. You’ll get information from them in the future, but right now it’s more important you get their money now. Forcing registration is one big way you’re going to have customers abandon their shopping carts.

4) Stagger the registration process. Don’t have one big long page with everything on it. People will abandon a form half filled, but not a process half complete. What I mean is that if you take a registration page and break it up into 4 or 5 chunks, if someone has completed 1 or 2 stages, they’re more likely to finish the process if they get interrupted, whereas one big unfinished form is easy to let go of.

5) Simplfiy. You don’t need to ask them marketing questions or find out where they normally vacation. You need to sell them something. Don’t try and do market research with your sales. Customers HATE that. They’ll abandon the cart rather than answer the questions.

6) Through the whole process be communicative. Address questions, explain errors, highight required fields. Hold their hand, and try and make it as easy and quick and painless as possible to get through it all. You don’t need to add barriers to sales, you need to remove them.

***

Ok so how would a good sales process look? Ok let’s assume that the user has selected the Terry Bradshaw football and jersey. They click proceed to checkout.

Stage 1: Identify Them. You want to capture two things on this page. Email and password. This is an effective registration as well. You can identify them by their email and get them into your system. Also they won’t hopefully forget their email. Don’t do usernames. People forget usernames. They’re a waste of time. As far as the password goes have the password field, and a confirm password field, just to make sure since they can’t see their password when they enter it, becuase you’re hopefully using a password field there. Also preferably have the constant check of the level of security of the password. You know where it says low medium or high security, and suggests things like adding a number or a capital letter, etc.

Once you get through stage 1 you’ve got their email. Even if they don’t finish the process you can send them a reminder in the future if they abandon the cart “hey we noticed you never finished blah blah blah….”

Stage 2: Shipping Address. If you’re shipping something, you need the address. If it’s an online delivery format, discern it here. This stage is about how they’re getting what you’re giving them. If it’s an online login you can skip this step and give it to them after the confirmation. If you’re shipping something to them though this is the enter your shipping address and pick your shipping type stage. Be sure not to piss off people from other countries too. A form that adjusts the fields per country you ship too will be appreciated. IE if you want to sell to Candians as well as Americans be sure your form handles it. Don’t just have american states in the dropdowns, or a 5 digit postal code.

Stage 3: Billing Information. Here you’ll need to capture their billing address, be sure to have it default to the same as the shipping address, and let them change it if they want to. Then grab their payment information, credit card, etc.

Stage 4: Confirm order for the user before you process the purchase. Show what they’re buying, all the taxes, etc, list out out like an invoice, hopefully with pictures to remind them of what they’re getting. let them click a final button to confirm the purchase. Make it obvious to the user that ‘if you click this button you’re buying it…right here.” Show your security. SSL, trust symbols, Verisign, your own thing. Whatever. Let them know that their purchase is secure and they’re ok.

Stage 5: You confirm to the user the purchase was made, you show them what theyr’e getting, confirm their information, tell them what to do if there is a problem. Hopefully you’ve also sent an email to them, let them know that you’ve sent an email, make them a confirmation notice, with an order number that they can print out a hard copy of and reference.

Then if you want to start doing market research on them you can. You can ask some more questions if you want, but only after it’s obvious that they’re done. Most people will leave at that point, but tha’t sok. You’ve got them to make a purchase, and you’ve got their contact information.

***

Anyway is that so hard? Can’t everyone just do that? If you’re not doing that you’re leaving money on the table, guaranteed.

http://gizmodo.com/5574821/uh-oh-adobe-porn-industry-prepping-to-ditch-flash

So looks like the biggest Porn house is going to stop using Flash tech as soon as IE8 starts supporting HTML5. (I won’t hold my breath, IE8 has really lagged behind the other browsers in supporting CSS3 and HTML5 but that’s nothing new. They’ve historically done things their own way…

The point though is that, whether people like it or not, Porn leads in technology. VHS Tapes? Porn. They got into VHS (and picked it over Betamax) before most people had a VHS machine in their house. They led that technology. Same with CD-ROM’s and DVD movies and High Def DVD’s. Blu Ray won partly because of Porn. 3 months before Toshiba gave up on the HDDVD format all the porn studios had stopped producing in it, and had moved strictly to BluRay.

The point is that where porn goes technology wise has been a pretty big indicator of where the rest of us soon will be, and one of the biggest houses in Porn just said “Flash, it’s been fun but…”

Throw on top of that the previous talk from Apple about how they’ll pretty much NEVER put Flash on their iPads and iPods and iPhones and iWhatevers….So companies interested in all those people and the growing alternate means of accessing the internet will be avoiding Flash more and more.

Honestly… I’m glad. I’ve disliked Flash for a decade. Oh I’ve done stuff in it, and I’m not going to get into every single reason I dislike the format, but I will say this. Adding Media to your site, adding content to your site…that’s a good thing… But locking it to a format that god knows how many of your customers won’t be able to see, is just dumb.

Like if you’re a restaurant. Why have a flash website? One of your customers might be trying to check out your website from their iPhone before lunch to see whether they should go there. Not only should you not have any Flash on your website, you should probably have been smart enough to pay additional money for a mobile version of the site.

“I want a flash splash screen that the user has to play a game on to get into the site, like nothing hard, but it’d be cool if they have to drag like say pieces of a puzzle together in order to enter the site.”

That’s a paraphrase, but it’s pretty close to something I once heard. Is the customer always right?

Lord no.

Flash crashes browsers. Flash is STILL not well read content and SEO wise by the search engines (it’s made forward strides in it, but it’s NOT as good as HTML) not to mention throwing in usability issues…You don’t want to make accessing your site and information on your site difficult.

I’m sure people will abuse HTML 5 to make poorly usable wesbites. It’s probably inevitable. Usability is important, and it’s tricky, but it looks more and more like the technology that will be used to implement usable solutions in the future won’t be flash, and I’m glad.

Well we’re almost there, but every time I think we’re in the future we’re back in the present. Of course then all that stuff is in the past…

The image above, if you’re hopelessly clueless, is from the movie 2001. The main character, who would be much better captured by the great Roy Scheider in the sequel 2010, has just taken a Pan Am space shuttle up to an orbiting space station where he’s going to get a connecting flight to the Moon.

Ok already it’s like….Damn…We’re really slackers when it comes to getting out into space…

Anyway he gets up to the space station, talks to some Russians and then goes to call his wife and daughter before he heads off for the Moon. You know….Like he’s in Denver or something. Anyway the phone booth is comfy and spacious, and the phone is a video phone.  Now, this is something that actually is all throughout the 2001, and 2010 universes. While they have regular phones, most phones have transitioned to video phones. Wall phones. Etc.

The thing is we’ve had video calls for awhile now. Video conferencing, etc. it’s not anything new, but for some reason it’s just not become big or caught on. People have made all sorts of explanations as to why like people don’t want to be seen, but I just don’t think that’s it. Yeah people like their privacy, and maybe sometimes they’ll want to keep their camera off, but look at all the webcaming. Look at the youtube and vblogs and whatever. People want to be seen. Especially people in the most targeted demos.

So why no video calling on a mass scale?

It’s been free for awhile now. most computers come with a webcam, or if not they’re super cheap, and then the software to webcam is free. But that involves knowing it exists, installing it, arranging someone else to log on at the same time and maybe tney don’t etc. It’s got alot of usability barriers. The technology is there though. And I think the desire for it is there.

Enter today, possibly, the iPhone 4. Word on the street is that it has a front facing camera. For video calls. This could be it.

Or it could not. It’s all about how it’s implemented.

If it’s something wher eyou have to use ichat and call someone else with iChat it’s not going to be huge. Oh they’ll TALK it up, and some people will love it, but if it means that you have to log onto ichat and someone else needs to log onto ichat and then connect up that way over wifi….well that’s a problem.

Still it’s gonna be neat.

But we need a video phone that you can call ANYONE. If I want to call my relatives in England who just have a regular phone it has to be the same app. If they don’t have video, then fine. No video. If I call someone who HAS video though over an iphone or something, then the video should be there (with a suitable warning so that I am not picking my nose).

However if it’s like Skyping with my parents now to show them their grandkids, and I have to call them to arrange it first, then really that’s just too annoying and not good usability.

As soon as there is a video phone though, which now means on a mobile device because that’s what phones are, and it has good usability it’s going to become the standard overnight and within 5 years everyone’s phones will be video phone capable.

That’s my 2 cents. It’s all about usability. Make the thing usable and people will use it. People WANT to use it. People are going out of their way to find work arounds. Keep it simple stupid, and you’ll make millions.

Design means making choices. Choices about choices, even. What do you want your users to be able to do with your system? What choices do you want to give them? I think that in general, the better usability lies in restricting user choices as much as possible.

You see it everywhere. Like Microsoft vs. Apple for instance. Microsoft comes from a much looser design standpoint, one of providing users many many options. Heck, they even allow it in the programs that run on their machines. They don’t restrict the hardware that can be used with Windows. They let programs edit the registry data, or allocate memory in really stupid ways. Lots of freedom for programers, for programs, for users….and it causes problems.

Whether it’s the kind of systematic freedom that allows a program to install a printer driver on your computer while also forcing you to install a recipe organizer, a photo editor, and a stamp collection, or alter your computer in subtle ways that breaks an important piece of completely unrelated software, or to run an unnecessary background process which eats up half your computers memory, Windows and Microsoft have always been big on giving developers whatever they want and letting the pieces fall where they may. This allows smart, and good, programmers to build some pretty remarkable things on the PC. It also allows the other 90% to write some pretty bad ones.

Apple is in many ways the exact opposite. They tightly control the operating system and the hardware. They only let the operating system work with specific hardware. It MIGHT work with something else if you jury rig a machine, but don’t count on it. They also highly restrict what programers can do within the system itself. For awhile they didn’t even tell people openly how to program on their Operating Systems, where the coding for Windows books filled shelves at bookstores, and in my basement.

Oh MFC programming, how I’ve totally forgotten you…Did I really once know C++? I think I’ve overwritten that part of my brain.

Anyway…fast forward to the world wide web and me talking about it on a blog…

When you present an application, or a website, to a user you need to think about what they’re going to do, and what you want them to do. You already make choices. Let’s say you put the logo in the top left, which is pretty damn standard these days. You don’t make it a movable layer to let the user move it anywhere they want. Why would you do that? What purpose could that solve?

I imagine myself in some office where a douchebag sales guy tries to explain how he likes to move the logo to the bottom left because that’s where it feels ‘real’ to him or something completely anecdotal and absurd.

Even if 1% of users feel that way, do they REALLY care if they can’t move that logo? Does it REALLY give them anything? Of course not. It’s pointless. However if 80% of users were to say they wouldn’t use the application because they couldn’t move the logo from the top right corner, I’d say “ok well…lets let them do that then.” Even if I didn’t fully understand why. I’d probably TRY to understand why.

Still that’s a dumb example. Nobody cares about that, so we don’t do it. The logo is fine in the top left, or top center, or whatever, and people are fine with that.

What about a more ‘current’ example?

I’ve been talking with CustomMade about restricting users to 10 listings within each of their Galleries. Each particular woodworker should only be allowed 10 listings to show up within a Gallery, though they can have as many as they want within their own user profile area, and they’d show up in search. The reason for this is to not let any one single woodworker ‘drown out’ all of them in the gallery by putting in 200 items. So how do we handle this, when we’re not currently handling it at all?

Well we could just restrict it in the SQL call we use to pull up the gallery listings. We could say ‘we’re gonna pull 10 random listings of yours and put them on the gallery page.’ It’d be easy, fast, the user would have no choices to make, and the problem would be solved. we’d be systematically solving the problem with no user involvement.

However, do most users want to CHOOSE which items they get to list? I haven’t surveyed them yet, but I’m willing to bet that they do want to. They don’t want a random sampling to show up, they want what they think are their 10 BEST items to show up. How we solve that then becomes about altering the user interface in some way, maybe even adding pages, and features, to let the user CONTROL what they’re showing.

Other times you simply don’t want to give users the option. For instance with text editing. CMS is great, as it allows people to quickly change a name or phone number, but way too often they include stuff that’s not really good to put in people’s hands.

Some people might change the fonts for some paragraphs or be overly fond of making things bold.

They might even use colors, and really go crazy, making what was once a refined user content contributed site, a pretty nasty looking thing, like Myspace.

Sometimes you just don’t want to give people those kind of choices. Other times…maybe you do. If you give people choices you need to both feel like those choices are NECESSARY in that without them you’re taking away a key piece of functionality the user demands, but at the same time you need to judge those demands and even if people want something, like colored text, it doesn’t mean that it’s smart to give it to them. They need to be QUALIFIED to use those features.

So design means making choices. It means determining what features and functionality are not only necessary for your application, but which you have users qualified to use them.

Which brings me to our product line. We’re specifically designing and developing odaycare, oclubhouse, ofitnessclub, and olawfirm with these concepts in mind. We want to provide the specific functionality the different users need, because a membership club needs different things than a daycare or a health club, but at the same time we want to provide those features in a way that is easy to use, and as restrictive as possible. We don’t believe in letting our users do whatever they want just because they want it. We believe in making applications that do things the way you’ll be happy with the outcome. We’ve spent time thinking about these products, and we’ve had numerous experts in their fields help us determine WHAT kinds of features and functionality are necessary, and they all have a ways to go, and we plan on continually updating and improving all of the products with new and cooler features.

We’re just not going to do everything. We’re going to do what’s necessary, and right, and the customers who use the products will thank us for it.